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Netflix, Youtube Surpass 50% Mark of Internet Traffic

Posted by Unknown on from the reading-is-hard dept.

First time accepted submitter sqorbit writes "Netflix and Youtube are gaining ground not only on the competition, such as Amazon, but also over peer-to-peer file sharing. Netflix claims more than 30 million customers and believes it could double that number in the future. Traffic from Netflix and Youtube amounted to over 50% of Internet traffic in September. Meanwhile Bittorrent traffic is down slightly (7.4% from 10%) in Internet traffic compared to last year. Could more people be satisfied with current video offerings or are less people finding useful things to download via file sharing?"

43 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. Build it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... and they will come.

    1. Re:Build it by c0lo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      As my boss reminds me: give a 110%. All the percentages must go up!

      No, not all. For instance: the percentage of increase for wages - those must go down, India's waiting.

      --
      Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
    2. Re:Build it by reub2000 · · Score: 2

      The tube sites have everyone covered for a few millenniums worth of porn. Who needs torrents?

    3. Re:Build it by Chalnoth · · Score: 2

      Yup. But sadly, I imagine the movie studios will take away the opposite conclusion: that their anti-piracy efforts are working.

    4. Re:Build it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Truly you must be a man of taste and caliber if you will settle for nothing less than a 1080p rip of "High Ho, High Ho, It's Up Your Arse We Go".

    5. Re:Build it by dave420 · · Score: 2

      They might be the ideal distribution system for OSS, but they're not used for that nearly as much as the other use you seem to not appreciate.

  2. The thing about relative measures... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Could more people be satisfied with current video offerings or are less people finding useful things to download via file sharing?

    Or is it something that's not a false dichotomy? An increase in Netflix, YouTube traffic will result in a decrease in the amount of bittorrent traffic in terms of percent, even if absolute usage remains the same. Likewise, a decrease in bittorrent traffic will lead to higher percentages for Netflix and YouTube. That doesn't indicate (or rule out) a relationship between the two (i.e. leaving bittorrent behind for Netflix) except in that it is a relative measure.

    1. Re:The thing about relative measures... by Unknown1337 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Exactly what I was thinking. Netflix has expanded its coverage of HD and 'super HD' while Youtube has increased the quality/resolution of its content as well. Increased quality comes with increased data transfer, while a 700MB file will always transmit 700MB. The customer base has probably grown and there is likely some relationship between the cost effective viewing and increased usage of these services, but overall they are simply sending more data for the same content which makes this a nearly irrelevant thing to measure. It would be like proving global warming by switching to Fahrenheit when you used to use Celsius... it just doesn't add up and the 2 are not comparable without conversion.

  3. Hoarders by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Could more people be satisfied with current video offerings or are less people finding useful things to download via file sharing?
     
    Could be that most download hoarders are finally coming to their senses that out of the 250gigs of MP3s they've downloaded they're really only listening to about 2gigs worth? That's my guess... that and the fact that you can only beat off so many times a year so having 65 days of pr0n doesn't make much sense either.
     
    Or maybe it's people who've gotten sick of downloading 5 gigs worth of an e-book collection for a single book that's about 6 dollars on Amazon.
     
    I know tons of people who've done the bit torrent stockpiling and I've never seen any of them come close to using a double digit percentage of what they've ripped off. It's like the people who get the high end NetFlix package and rip the discs and return them the next day. How many of those discs never get watched? My guess is a ton of them never see the tray of a DVD player.

    1. Re:Hoarders by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Regarding the DVD ripping, I tried that back when Blockbuster had the "unlimited rentals with in store exchange" deal going on.

      They would mail you 3 DVDs, then you would rip them, drop them off at the store the next day and they would give you 3 in store rentals for free in exchange, while at the same time mailing you 3 more.

      When it first came out, they didn't wait for the in-store rentals to be returned before mailing the next set of discs. They changed that at some point.

      So you could get up to 12 movies a week if you were swapping them every 3 days or so.

      After a few months, I had several TB of hard drive space full of movies that... frankly weren't likely to ever be watched.

      Then Blu-Ray came out, and the quality there was good enough that it made the ripped copies look like crap. I ended up deleting them. That was a LOT of hours of time wasted.

      So yea, the idea that I'll have this huge horde ended up being rather silly. Now I just put the PS3 or Ruku on and stream more content than I will ever have time to watch and life is good.

      Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, and Hulu Plus might not be perfect, they each have their own issues, they don't have "everything", but boy, they sure have enough stuff to keep my family busy most of the time.

    2. Re:Hoarders by nurb432 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      When the commercial outlets drop something out of existence you want due to low demand, you will thank the so-called 'hoarders'.

      --
      ---- Booth was a patriot ----
    3. Re:Hoarders by ifiwereasculptor · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I was a hoarder. For me, I guess what happened was that my broadband capacity finally reached a point in which I feel comfortable with stuff being in the cloud. If I wanted to watch Star Trek six years ago on my 800Kbps connection, I'd have to torrent every episode. Then I'd burn discs because, in case I wanted to watch again, I didn't want to go through the trouble of redownloading everything - it took days. Now Netflix and Youtube mean that a lot of what I want is permanently (and readily, thanks to a 35Mbps connection) available and I have no reason to hoard anymore, so my torrenting has decreased a lot. Steam sales and Humble Bundles also meant I have essentially stopped pirating (except for good titles with annoying DRM, like Bioshock 2) - I just give it a year of two for games to come to a reasonable price and leave my library on the cloud. I think that's what happened to a lot of people - and, in third world countries, quite recently.

    4. Re:Hoarders by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Posting as AC since I don't want the CISPA to allow a newly minted Ministry Of Copyrights to send their secret police in the near future....

      I've stored over a thousand movies either from direct ripping, or downloading good encodes. I have found that on demand (Netflix) does not have a whole lot going in the movie categories. As a result, I have been watching movies again from my archives. I simply refuse to shell out a couple of bucks each time I want to watch something. Fuck them, I paid to see it in the movie theater, I paid to get the DVD copy, how much blood do they want to siphon off me? So, yes, I do store movies to watch them again, or watch them later on with friends and family. Some stuff is just classic.

      It just became a way of life to never ever watch the DVD. In fact, the advertisements and POU's pissed me off so fucking much, I had to rip it first. Actually paying for it (Around 30-40% of my collection are purchases) and being told, "No. You can't skip anything here. Sit down. STFU. Watch the previews".

      Right after I had the physical medium in hand I put it in my system, fired up DVD Decrypter, and made an image of the disc to be mounted afterwards and played. Plenty of media players like the WD TV Live will play an .iso file replete with DVD menus.

      I don't feel that any of the time has been wasted at all. My collection is nearing 100 TB. At this point I rarely use Netflix for anything other than watching TV shows. That's it's real value to me. TV shows with no advertisements or overlays. I can wait a year till the last season is available.

      The biggest failure of Big Entertainment is continuing this greedy war. My offer still stands. I will pay upwards of $50 a month for on-demand viewing of TV shows with ZERO advertisements of any kind. Any other deal they can go fuck themselves with a cactus.

      P.S - I still do a brisk business with the DVDs by mail. After I download a good encode for a movie I queue it up on Netflix and quite often never take it out the package when I receive it. I'm sending them back as quick as I get them. Netflix for me is way to compensate the artists.

    5. Re:Hoarders by EdIII · · Score: 5, Insightful

      As a "hoarder", I've documented my collection pretty well. I never burn anything to DVD's or USB hard drives. Everything is networked and available to all devices.

      It's about saving the really classic stuff. The real jewels of my collection are all the Disney and Looney Tunes cartoons. Stuff that is just not available on market today due their outright greed and insane copyright mentality. Some of the collections like M*A*S*H I ripped direct from the DVDs themselves.

      The real value of my collection? At some point in the future the stuff I have, while classic, will not be readily available. My collection, nearing triple digit TB's, will be easily duplicated and shared.

      My cartoon collection alone is very hard to come by. My younger relatives love to be able to watch Donald Duck and his nephews. Sadly, Disney being the douchenozzles they are have adamantly refused to share those cartoons with today's children.

    6. Re:Hoarders by fafalone · · Score: 2
      As a hoarder, my downloading has slowed down quite a bit. I've downloaded every TV show and movie I'd ever be interested in watching, in HD if available. Now the only downloading I do is new episodes or new movies (and of course when something I like comes out higher quality). I am indeed quite satisfied with my 10TBs of 281 movies and 82 full series.

      But streaming/pay services for video in their current form will never see a penny from me. For the way I consume media, their shortcomings are a deal breaker:
      • Streaming is wholly unacceptable since it requires an internet connection. Offline viewing, and viewing without "buffering..." if it drops out for a minute, is important. Even "1080p" streams are noticeably worse than actual Blurays (and 12gb rips for that matter). Streaming should be AN option, not the only one.
      • Permanent copies in a non-DRM'd format are still not the norm for movies/tv. They haven't learned from music.
      • There's no excuse for such poor selections and different services offering different things. It's a blatant example of corporate greed preventing what consumers want.
      • So are all types of geographic limitations/delays.
      • Even more infuriating is when items available are removed from the service. And when the service itself up and shuts down.

      None of these are limits of technology, and all of these are why legit offerings can't compete with illegal ones, regardless of price. Fix all of those, and add what is lacking in pirated sources (bonus materials, dl speed on some stuff, ease of access), and you'll find that like audio, legit video can also successfully compete with free.

    7. Re:Hoarders by spire3661 · · Score: 2

      The netflix version of TNG looks like crap compared to the Blu-Ray re-masters. Also, things disappear off Netflix. After King of the Hill disappeared, i DLed the whole series.

      --
      Good-bye
    8. Re:Hoarders by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 4, Interesting
      What is the cost in time and money to maintain 100 TB of videos?

      I used to have eight 3TB hard drives in my home server, storing all my downloaded and ripped videos.

      Back when I started in 2006, it was 1TB drives, then 1.5TB drives (Frys had a deal on them back then, $115!). Then 2TB, then 3TB.

      I looked at upgrading to 4TB drives, then something caused me to do the math. All the money spent to keep up with it? I could have just bought most of it on Blu-Ray and been done with it.

      My local media storage is down to 6.8TB, I've deleted about 10TB worth in the past few months, waste of time, space, and money.

      You know what? I don't miss any of it.

      What I did keep was stuff that isn't easy to find on the popular services. I have a number of old war movies and documentaries that aren't on the various services, those I kept. I have the complete rip of 10 seasons of Modern Marvels, that is pretty cool and nice for the kids.

      Blockbuster movies? Blah, I can stream those, Amazon Prime Video these days looks darn good on the big TV.

    9. Re:Hoarders by lgw · · Score: 2

      I fear you're right. Netflix just keeps dropping older stuff, both from streaming and from DVD. I just don't get it.

      I don't want to torrent anything! It's just crazy that no one will take my money to stream me the vast back catalog of titles that have entered the digital domain.

      It's time for mandatory licensing of older works. You know what - I'm OK with 100 year copyright if after 10 works fall under some FRAND scheme and all the Netflix's of the world get to stream them for a nominal fee.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    10. Re:Hoarders by jxander · · Score: 2

      Similar theory: the majority of people who are going to torrent already have their libraries full, regardless of how much they're watching said library

      TPB is famous enough that anyone even remotely in tune with the internet at large could easily figure out how to download the complete James Bond collection, or whatever they fancy. But once they have that (and the complete Star Trek collection, Game of Thrones, etc) there isn't as much of a glut. Just steadily downloading new stuff as it becomes available.

      --
      This signature is false.
    11. Re:Hoarders by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      FRAND would be the most sane thing to do.

      The most sane thing to do would be to restore the original term for Copyright. Life moves faster now, but copyrights expire slower. That is obviously bullshit.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    12. Re:Hoarders by nurb432 · · Score: 2

      True, people with obscure collections are not up 24/7, but they at least have a copy safely stored away and it can be returned back to the community pool at some point.

      --
      ---- Booth was a patriot ----
    13. Re:Hoarders by nurb432 · · Score: 2

      The media that 'surrounds us' currently is trash. This makes it even more important to rescue and protect the classics. Due to the current level of intelligence in society, obscure is 'the good stuff'. In another 15 years if we have lost our 'history', it will be a loss for all.

      This also includes books. Especially as more and more move to electronic format only. So much knowledge has been lost due to books fading out before they were rescued.

      --
      ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  4. Thanks Google by Powercntrl · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I was indifferent about YouTube until it inexplicably linked itself to my Gmail account and now wants me to create a Google+ page in order to comment on videos. Now, I'd like nothing more to see it go up in flames, like a Tesla that hit some road debris.

    --

    ---
    DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
    1. Re:Thanks Google by Rick+Zeman · · Score: 2

      I was indifferent about YouTube until it inexplicably linked itself to my Gmail account and now wants me to create a Google+ page in order to comment on videos. Now, I'd like nothing more to see it go up in flames, like a Tesla that hit some road debris.

      I compensated for that by deleting my YouTube channel account. I encourage every one else to do the same.

    2. Re:Thanks Google by Forever+Wondering · · Score: 5, Informative

      Sounds like you're logged into gmail when you go to youtube.

      Logout [of gmail] first [possibly clearing some cookies] and you'll have no problem. I have a gmail account [but I only access it through POP3/IMAP from thunderbird--thus, it's never logged in] and I don't have the same problem. I did have the same problem one time when I was logged into gmail.

      If you'd rather not logout/login on gmail repeatedly, you can create a separate browser profile [Firefox, at least] for youtube, etc.

      --
      Like a good neighbor, fsck is there ...
    3. Re:Thanks Google by Nerdfest · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Out of curiosity, why does it bother you? I consider it a great feature (the single account, not the nagging). I don't imagine it makes much of a difference to Google one way or the other with respect to information collection.

    4. Re:Thanks Google by Inda · · Score: 2, Informative

      I never log out of Gmail and Google stopped hassling me about linking YouTube or using my real name a while back. One browser, rarely clear cookies.

      Mountains out of mole hills.

      --
      This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
  5. Amazon Prime Video / Netflix / Hulu - Good Enough by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 5, Insightful
    To be honest, I'll admit that a few years ago, I was a frequent user of The Pirate Bay.

    Now? For less than $25 a month, I have Amazon Prime Videos, Netflix, and Hulu Plus. They provide me with, more or less, all the video content I really want. (and more than I could ever watch)

    There are shows and movies that come and go from these services that I'd *like* to have, but there is so much to watch, I can't be bothered to pirate them anymore.

    So finally the media companies are offering a legal service that is approaching *good enough* status. It isn't perfect and yes, there are features we don't have yet that can be had with a pirate copy, but at some point it gets close enough that my time is worth more than messing with it. For the cost of 2 movie tickets a month, we have endless things to watch (and not nearly enough time to watch them all, my "to watch list keeps growing").

    I currently have DirecTV in my home, cost is about $100 a month. I'm not quite ready to ditch it yet (because of my kids, Disney and Nick are popular in my house), but I see that day coming. The few things that we watch that aren't on Prime/Netflix/Hulu can be purchased by the episode most of the time, sooner or later, cable/satellite will be really pointless.

    I'm sure for many, that day has already arrived. More and more each year are likely to cut that cord, just as they did with landlines. I cut my landline in 2005 and never looked back, so will it be with DirecTV at some point.

  6. Not to worry. by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It won't be long before our fully-purchased representatives finish overturning the last vestiges of Network Neutrality, allowing our Rightful Owners to specify and enforce the proper balance of Internet traffic.

  7. Enjoy it while you can by paiute · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Dear Netflix and Youtube watcher,

    Our customers have reported stuttering, loss of signal, blackouts, and insertion of pornographic images and video into their streams. We are doing everything we can to fix this problem. In the meantime you might consider upgrading to Xfinity streaming service, which we guarantee will not be hit by these glitches.

    regards,

    Comcast

    --
    If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
    1. Re:Enjoy it while you can by timeOday · · Score: 2
      As a long-time Comcast customer it seems to me things are going in the other direction - better! They had a 250GB cap for a while and then gave up on it. Years ago, youtube used to stall all the time and now rarely does. Then youtube was OK but then Netflix (then Prime) always paused to buffer at least a couple times during a show, whereas now it hardly ever does. I've been a VOIP user since I think 2004 (Vonage then Ooma) and, whereas it was initially fairly embarrassing to use, the spousal complaint rate has really gone down the last couple years.

      I don't think Comcast can put the cat back in the bag at this point. People just expect stuff to work. And Comcast no longer dwarfs the content providers (Google, Netflix, Amazon...) They won't lie down.

      Of course YMMV, I'm curious if others still have a lot of trouble streaming video?

    2. Re:Enjoy it while you can by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Sounds like you missed this little tidbit.

    3. Re:Enjoy it while you can by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      As a long-time Comcast customer it seems to me things are going in the other direction - better! They had a 250GB cap for a while and then gave up on it.

      They had a 90GB cap for a while, and then gave up on it! Guess I was a Comcast customer before you. This was before they had a page that would tell you when you went over the cap, and before you could get a front-line employee to tell you what the cap was. The third guy I talked to finally spilled the beans, and I finally stopped getting letters from Comcast when I stopped going over 90. This was probably a decade ago now, my god we've had cable internet a long time and yet where I live now I'm still on a shitty WISP with a 1-1.5Mbps connection.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  8. Re:1st post! by nurb432 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    1 - If you like obscure stuff, chances are its not there
    2 - Many people don't like to have to be "online" just to watch or listen, or read. ( and be at the mercy of the provider and what they feel like offering this month )

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  9. Youtube has a lot of full length movies by Trax3001BBS · · Score: 3, Interesting

    http://www.reddit.com/r/fullmoviesonyoutube/

    PS3 in a drop down fashion are NetFlix, youtube, then of course Amazon instant videos and Red Box
    showed up on the last update -4.5.

    Flame: Know how time consuming it was to find that reddit link? It used to be a tab on my browser.

    Yesterday I updated Opera 12 to version 17. I didn't want to lose the /. taking me to slashdot feature so put it off.
    Opera doesn't have bookmarks anymore, how truly asinine is that? Nor can I disable flash, and much more.
    So I don't use Opera after well since forever, but FireFox that auto log's me into a site (for the moment).
    and off topic but I'm still hot over it.

  10. Data went up... by viperidaenz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    But did consumption go up or did video bit rate go up?
    Maybe more people are now selecting "HD" streaming than they used to.

  11. I would like more information, please by PopeRatzo · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you click a few levels through the story, you'll find that the data comes from Sandvine, whose customers are the big telecoms. Considering the battle over net neutrality, I'd say that Sandvine is not a neutral source in this discussion.

    I'd like to see data from some other sources on "Netflix and Youtube are half of all Internet traffic".

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
    1. Re:I would like more information, please by Anubis+IV · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Not everyone who gets paid by an industry is automatically in its pocket. In this case, they gain nothing by doctoring the report.

      Sandvine's numbers are taken as fact by pretty much everyone in the know. When I was in grad school, they were the ones posting the numbers saying that torrents accounted for whatever insane percentage of Internet traffic that they once accounted for (30%+, as I recall), and practically every research paper I read quoted something Sandvine had published at some point. As I recall, the reason they're able to get such accurate numbers is because their customers are the big telecoms, which gives them the sort of access they need to make these assessments. Without that sort of access, the best you could do is get some numbers from large universities, local ISPs, and CDNs. Of those, the first two wouldn't be useful in the least for extrapolating traffic patterns to the population at large, and good luck getting these sorts of numbers from the CDNs.

      Look back on Sandvine's historical data and you'll see that they haven't exactly done the entrenched telecoms any favors, since they seem to just tell it like it is, time and again, regardless of what the implications may be.

  12. The Former by tom229 · · Score: 2

    This is all the entertainment industry needs to do. Get behind a financial sane method of delivering media, that's more convenient than pirating, and the "war" is over. Prohibition is never the answer, yet it always seems to be the first response.

    --
    If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
  13. Re:26 percent != "slightly" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's not a drop in torrent traffic, it's a drop in percentage. It could have gone up on an absolute scale, but if the total grew faster, then the percentage that it occupies still goes down.

  14. Basic arithmetic by J'raxis · · Score: 2

    Meanwhile Bittorrent traffic is down slightly (7.4% from 10%) in Internet traffic compared to last year. Could more people be satisfied with current video offerings or are less people finding useful things to download via file sharing?

    Or, could it be that someone doesn't understand percentages? If there are three people in a room, and two are using BitTorrent, that's 67%. If a fourth person walks in, and two people are still using BitTorrent, usage isn't down at all, but the percentage shrank to 50%.

    BitTorrent traffic could be shrinking, or it could be holding steady, or it could even be increasing, just not enough for its proportion of total Internet traffic to even remain constant. But you can't tell anything by just looking at percentages of the whole like that.

    --
    Liberty in your lifetime
  15. 75% is refreshes by SmallFurryCreature · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Anyone want to bet what percentage of traffic is people refreshing the page because the youtube player got stuck again?

    --

    MMO Quests are like orgasms:

    You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.

    1. Re:75% is refreshes by hairyfeet · · Score: 2

      I'd rather see how much of the traffic is from the new "pirate tubes" like viooz because at least in my area more and more have simply started going to them and watching online instead of using BT.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.