The “unquestioned king” of North American Internet content has just been crowned.
Accounting for 29.7% of all information downloaded during peak usage hours by North American broadband-connected households in March, Netflix Inc. received the title in the latest Global Internet Phenomena Report released by Sandvine Corp. on Tuesday.
In its ninth such report, Waterloo, Ont.-based Sandvine found the amount of data consumed by users streaming television shows and movie from Netflix’s online service exceeded even that of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing technology BitTorrent.
But that doesn’t mean sanctioned Internet video services such as Netflix or Hulu are wholly replacing P2P services such as BitTorrent, which has become synonymous with piracy.
“Netflix has surpassed file sharing and BitTorrent, but BitTorrent hasn’t really declined,” explained Tom Donnelly, co-founder and executive vice president of network technology maker Sandvine.
“Given that there hasn’t been a decline in volume of file sharing traffic you could easily suppose that these are new people using Netflix. There are clearly a number of people who, for whatever reason, are not going to use file sharing networks to access content and now they have another choice.”
Rather than switching from using BitTorrent to download music and video files to consuming video via streaming services such as Netflix, users are simply spending more time online generally, and a growing proportion of that time is spent watching Netflix, Mr. Donnelly said.
Netflix’s 29.7% share of downstream Internet traffic represents a 44% increase from the last Sandvine report released seven months ago, when Netflix represented closer to 20% of peak download traffic.
Real-time entertainment services, which in addition to Netflix included other streaming video services such as YouTube, accounted for nearly half (49.2%) of all North American Internet traffic during peak periods. That figure is expected to reach as high as 60% by the end of this year.
Netflix’s foray into Canada, the report said, provides a case study for what Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can expect once the service expands beyond the United States and Canada.
Canada became the Los Gatos, Calif.-based company’s first international market last September when it launched a streaming-only service in the country. Since then, more than 800,000 Canadians have signed on for Netflix in Canada, representing about 10% of Canadian households with broadband connections.
That is a sign of things to come worldwide, according to the Sandvine report:
With the rapid success of Netflix in Canada, Internet providers worldwide, regardless of access technology and degree of mobility, must plan for a future in which on-demand video (whether provided by Netflix or another service) is a large proportion, if not the majority of, last-mile traffic.
More people watching more video online is certainly good news for companies such as Netflix and a host of rivals.
However, the trend represents a growing challenge for Canadian ISPs who are spending billions of dollars upgrading their physical networks to handle the increasing bandwidth demands associated with greater online video consumption.
Canadian ISPs such as BCE Inc.’s Bell Canada unit and Rogers Communications Inc. recently fought a highly politicized regulatory battle over proposed usage-based billing policies.
While opponents (Netflix included) criticized UBB for placing arbitrary limits on the amount of data a subscriber could download each month before incurring hefty overage fees — which some critics charged was a way of discouraging the adoption of services like Netflix in favour of the ISPs own Web-based and on-demand video services — while Bell and others have argued UBB is necessary to manage rising issues of network congestion.
In March, Rogers even admitted to accidentally limiting access to the popular online game World of Warcraft in an attempt to deal with congestion-related issues.
“The fact is that the volume of traffic over the Internet grows exponentially,” said Mr. Donnelly.
“It grows a lot, and it grows a lot every single year.”
Accounting for 29.7% of all information downloaded during peak usage hours by North American broadband-connected households in March, Netflix Inc. received the title in the latest Global Internet Phenomena Report released by Sandvine Corp. on Tuesday.
In its ninth such report, Waterloo, Ont.-based Sandvine found the amount of data consumed by users streaming television shows and movie from Netflix’s online service exceeded even that of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing technology BitTorrent.
But that doesn’t mean sanctioned Internet video services such as Netflix or Hulu are wholly replacing P2P services such as BitTorrent, which has become synonymous with piracy.
“Netflix has surpassed file sharing and BitTorrent, but BitTorrent hasn’t really declined,” explained Tom Donnelly, co-founder and executive vice president of network technology maker Sandvine.
“Given that there hasn’t been a decline in volume of file sharing traffic you could easily suppose that these are new people using Netflix. There are clearly a number of people who, for whatever reason, are not going to use file sharing networks to access content and now they have another choice.”
Rather than switching from using BitTorrent to download music and video files to consuming video via streaming services such as Netflix, users are simply spending more time online generally, and a growing proportion of that time is spent watching Netflix, Mr. Donnelly said.
Netflix’s 29.7% share of downstream Internet traffic represents a 44% increase from the last Sandvine report released seven months ago, when Netflix represented closer to 20% of peak download traffic.
Real-time entertainment services, which in addition to Netflix included other streaming video services such as YouTube, accounted for nearly half (49.2%) of all North American Internet traffic during peak periods. That figure is expected to reach as high as 60% by the end of this year.
Netflix’s foray into Canada, the report said, provides a case study for what Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can expect once the service expands beyond the United States and Canada.
Canada became the Los Gatos, Calif.-based company’s first international market last September when it launched a streaming-only service in the country. Since then, more than 800,000 Canadians have signed on for Netflix in Canada, representing about 10% of Canadian households with broadband connections.
That is a sign of things to come worldwide, according to the Sandvine report:
With the rapid success of Netflix in Canada, Internet providers worldwide, regardless of access technology and degree of mobility, must plan for a future in which on-demand video (whether provided by Netflix or another service) is a large proportion, if not the majority of, last-mile traffic.
More people watching more video online is certainly good news for companies such as Netflix and a host of rivals.
However, the trend represents a growing challenge for Canadian ISPs who are spending billions of dollars upgrading their physical networks to handle the increasing bandwidth demands associated with greater online video consumption.
Canadian ISPs such as BCE Inc.’s Bell Canada unit and Rogers Communications Inc. recently fought a highly politicized regulatory battle over proposed usage-based billing policies.
While opponents (Netflix included) criticized UBB for placing arbitrary limits on the amount of data a subscriber could download each month before incurring hefty overage fees — which some critics charged was a way of discouraging the adoption of services like Netflix in favour of the ISPs own Web-based and on-demand video services — while Bell and others have argued UBB is necessary to manage rising issues of network congestion.
In March, Rogers even admitted to accidentally limiting access to the popular online game World of Warcraft in an attempt to deal with congestion-related issues.
“The fact is that the volume of traffic over the Internet grows exponentially,” said Mr. Donnelly.
“It grows a lot, and it grows a lot every single year.”