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Streaming Video Is 70 Percent of Broadband Use (recode.net)
An anonymous reader writes: Streaming entertainment is now the dominant form of broadband usage in North America. A new report from Sandvine says streaming accounts for roughly 70% of downstream traffic during peak times, and 65% of total traffic. That represents a doubling of video/audio streaming since five years ago. "Much of the increase comes from YouTube and Netflix, which already accounted for more than half of your broadband usage a couple of years ago, and continue to grow. But now those services are joined by relatively new entrants, like Amazon* and Hulu, which barely registered a couple of years ago and now account for nearly 6 percent of usage." Streaming doesn't take up such a big portion of traffic on mobile, but it still takes up more than any other type of traffic. It accounts for about 41% of peak downstream traffic, and 37% overall.
That's a very good point.
Weren't the RIAA/MPAA just telling us last year how the majority of Internet traffic was people torrenting (and assumedly pirating media)?
Now the figures say the fast amount of usage is people consuming media legally. Guess pirating isn't the big problem they said it was.
Well, that was a few years ago. In the meantime, a bunch of legit streaming services popped up - Netflix, Hulu, HBO, etc. etc. etc.
In fact, over the past 5 or so years, the amount of traffic Netflix consumes has grown and overtaken BitTorrent as the main downstream traffic (BitTorrent is still king on upstream). The only time Netflix is dethroned are the few days Apple releases a massive update (OS X or iOS) and pretty much overwhelms the Internet for a couple of days.
Basically, what has happened was we proved the assertion that people mostly pirate because they can't get what they want legally. Well, the rise of iTunes and other music retailers, digital downloads of TV shows and movies, streaming services like Netflix and HBO, music streaming services, pretty much goes to show that really, a good chunk of piracy was caused by the lack of legal options. (Heck, we knew iTunes did that - would people pirate music or would they buy it? The rise of iTunes' supremacy in selling music showed if you give them a consistent high quality source with little money, people will buy it over free).
Hell, even YouTube's got decent quality content up there as well.
Now if the rest of the world would get off their ass, look what happened in the US, and follow suit with providing legal services.
And yes, the remaining 30% is mostly BitTorrent. But that's a huge shift from when BitTorrent was the massive user of bandwidth by far.