Netflix won as in-home entertainment
(Mirror Daily, United States) – Almost expectedly, Netflix dominates American web traffic and stands tall as the champion of streaming media. And, perhaps to the surprise of most, it’s defeating internet piracy, if that is even possible. It seems that more services are now made available, and we might yet pass the dark age of torrents.
Networking company Sandvine Inc. found that streaming services have taken over the broadbands of in-home internet use. And it’s not doing so bad on smartphones either. In North America, Netflix continued its dominance, snatching 37% of downstream traffic between the September and October months when the study was conducted.
It has grown in popularity and now sits at the top, though understandably so. It offers a wide arrange of movies and TV series, along with a couple of original series. It’s fast, and at a decent price. Most of us have known the long nights binging on a favorite show on Netflix, and that’s unlikely to be just a one-time thing.
And it’s still an increase from April, when it held 36.5% of downstream traffic.
Following Netflix, the North American internet flow kept on favoring streaming media services, such as YouTube on second place with 18%. The most popular video service in the world saw to an increase as well from 15.5%, though it’s still less than half of Netflix.
Other streaming services that were in the top 10 list were Amazon Video with 3%, iTunes with 2.8%, and Hulu with 2.5%. Overall, it seems that streaming in general has doubled their internet traffic within the past 5 years. They’re becoming more popular, and leaving go-to applications behind, such as BitTorrent.
It seems like internet piracy is seeing a decline with the rise of ‘legal’ services carrying the torch around the web. From its days of glory in 2008 when it held 31% of the traffic, BitTorrent has found itself plummeting to a mere 4.4% at peak traffic. There might be a day when internet piracy will remain a story in future years, a period in time to remember as a mere fluke. Yes, torrents were strong, but streaming services prevailed.
It seems we’re heading in that direction, though we’re admittedly not there yet.
Social media continued to have a strong appearance as well. Facebook saw to a slight decline from 19% to 16% of the traffic share, but that’s still a decent slice. As far as messaging services are concerned, Snapchat was surprisingly the dominant one. It commanded more mobile traffic, though given its method of communicating through pictures, it may be understandable why its hogging more of the bandwidth.
Image source: digitaltrends.com
Joe Hennessey
