But a select group of companies whose products exist largely outside the public view are already profiting handsomely. Led by industry powerhouse Cisco Systems Inc., the network-equipment-makers are seeing their gear snapped up by service providers that must upgrade their networks to accommodate surging Internet traffic and booming broadband demand.

"Cisco would like to see video delivered to every device everywhere," said Zeus Kerravala, a network infrastructure analyst with Yankee Group. "If you're looking to something to create the next wave of network upgrades, video is front and center. It drives bandwidth like we've never seen before."

Video consumes thousands of times the network space of e-mail messages, and demand is growing so fast that it's poised to overtake peer-to-peer file sharing as the dominant form of Internet traffic.

But online video - which is projected to grow from $1.3 billion in revenue last year to more than $7 billion by 2010, according to the market research firm Parks Associates - isn't yet the profit machine the online community envisions. Companies are still grappling with how to generate reliable revenue from content that is largely free and often littered with copyright-infringement land mines.

That's a rich opportunity for Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, Juniper Networks Inc. and Redback Networks Inc., companies that build the Internet's infrastructure.

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