According to Cisco’s new Visual Networking Index (VNI) forecast, online video is growing faster than any other type of consumer service, and within four years online video services will be more popular than social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. The report predicts that by 2017 there will be 3.6 billion global Internet users and 19 billion global networked devices. Additionally, the average broadband speed will increase by a factor of 3.5 to 39 Mbps.

“The newest edition of Cisco’s data-heavy report on how we all spend our time and bandwidth points to social networking as the world’s most popular type of consumer service, with 1.2 billion users worldwide tweeting, Facebooking and more around the world in 2012,” reports GigaOM. “That’s 66 percent of residential Internet users, if you need to know. Cisco estimates that this number will grow to 1.73 billion users by 2017, which will then represent around 70 percent of the also-growing Internet population.”

“Online video services on the other hand had just around 1 billion users worldwide in 2012, according to Cisco. The company estimates that this number will almost double by 2017, reaching close to 2 billion users worldwide. That means that in four years, 81 percent of the world’s Internet users will also use online video services. In 2012, that number was still at around 58 percent,” explains the article.

Cisco anticipates 1.4 zettabytes of global end-user IP traffic in 2017 (more IP traffic than the Internet has experienced in the last 18 years). The company also predicts that mobile video will grow 16-fold from 2012 to 2017, and that game consoles will be used less to deliver online video to TVs as streaming boxes will see the biggest growth.

For more information on the VNI report, visit the Cisco site.