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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?"

25 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 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".

  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 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.

    7. 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.'"
  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 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 ...
    2. 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.

  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
  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. 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.