It was only a couple of years ago when Netflix was on the brink of shutting down. Now the company, together with YouTube, accounts for 50 percent of North America's fixed network data. With such huge margin, it also beats rivals Amazon and Hulu.
According to the report published by Sandvine, a provider of broadband networks, Netflix is the leading downstream application in the entire North America. It alone consumes 31.6% traffic. YouTube, on the other hand, consumes 18.6%.
The report titled "Global Internet Phenomena Report 2H2013", has been compiled from around 250 Sandvine customers' data who are based in North America, the Middle East, Europe and Africa.
The report found that it was the first time that peer-to-peer file-sharing was overtaken with a video streaming website. In 2002, peer-to-peer file-sharing constituted 60 percent of the total traffic. Presently, the peer-to-peer file sharing apps like BitTorrent account for even less than 10 percent of daily traffic in North America.
"For the first time ever, peer-to-peer filesharing has fallen below 10% of total traffic in North America, which is a stark difference from the 60% share it consumed 11 years ago," said Dave Caputo, CEO, Sandvine.
"Since 2009 on-demand entertainment has consumed more bandwidth than "experience later" applications like peer-to-peer filesharing and we had projected it would inevitably dip below 10% of total traffic by 2015. It's happened much faster. This phenomena, combined with the related rise in video applications like Netflix and YouTube, underscores a big reason why Sandvine's business has grown beyond traffic management to new service creation," Caputo said.
The report said that Netflix video bandwidth traffic was 20 times more than Amazon video and 24 times that of Hulu.
