While virtual reality is a promising technology, the overall adoption rate is still rather abysmal. It seems the price of decent VR headsets is not the only limiting factor in this regard. The lack of proper high-speed bandwidth for VR content also plays a critical role in this regard
The lack of VR Content Revolves Around Bandwidth
There is a very good reason why popular content providers such as Netflix are not banking big on VR just yet. Although the company keeps a close tab on this industry. developing VR content is not a priority right now. It seems the lack of proper bandwidth for at-home VR content consumption is a bigger problem than most people would assume at some point.
According to Interxion’s Brian Hill, the bandwidth problem is mainly present outside of the big cities. There is a very real bandwidth “obstacle”, as Hill phrases it. Latency issues, throughput limitations, and so forth are all reasons as to why at-home VR content consumption will not become a mainstream trend anytime soon.
One way to solve that is for VR content providers to distribute their content nodes to the densely populated markets. This is not a viable strategy, mind you, but it could offer a temporary solution. This also confirms bigger cities will see such VR capabilities first, whereas the rest of the world will have to wait and see how things evolve in this regard.
For now, there is no real pressure to bring more VR content to consumers. At the same time, consumers won’t flock to VR unless there is sufficient content to persuade them to make the switch. it is a very delicate balancing act, but one that may prove very difficult to pull off.
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