BitTorrent Traffic Falls In the U.S.

First time accepted submitter CAKAS writes "After legal actions taken by several industry outfits, BitTorrent traffic has fallen in the United States to the all time low of 12.7 percent of internet traffic. However, this trend seems to be unique to the U.S. — In other parts of the world, like Europe and Asia, BitTorrent traffic continues to rise. 'According to Sandvine, the absence of legal alternatives is one of the reasons for these high P2P traffic shares.' In the U.S. legal content delivery has flourished and provided customers easy access to content. This seems to suggest that due to these alternatives, people are less willing to pirate and pay the publishers for entertainment." (Calling it an "all-time low" seems a stretch, when talking about something released in 2001.)

Comments

Netflix, not "legal actions"

[TheEyes]

Filesharing lawsuits and six-strikes laws never did anything to stem the tide of piracy. What's been causing the fall of Bittorrent as a share of internet bandwidth in the US is the rise of legal streaming sites (Netflix, Hulu, etc), alternatives which don't exist in most of the rest of the world.

Re:Perhaps it's not that Bittorrent traffic fell

[WrongSizeGlass]

Maybe Americans are getting smart and using VPN's and proxies :D

Or US Internet traffic is growing - something the ISP's & cell carriers are crying about on a regular basis. If the overall usage goes up, stagnant BitTorrent traffic rates - or if the BT rates are growing at a slower rate as compared to overall US usage - will look like it declined.

We've DOWNLOADED all the MOVIES

[billstewart]

The reason BitTorrent traffic is falling is that everybody's downloaded all the old movies already. So now we're just getting the new ones, not catching up on backlog.