Efforts by Netflix to better compress its video library is likely the reason there’s been a modest change in the amount of traffic it represents on North American fixed networks. That’s the word from Sandvine’s “Global Internet Phenomena Report” released today that focuses on Latin America and North America. The data is derived from a selection of Sandvine’s 300-plus communications service provider customers.
According to the research, Netflix represented 35.2 percent of traffic on North America fixed networks. Six months ago, it was 37.1 percent. However, even with improvements in streaming efficiency, Netflix’s traffic share on fixed networks in Latin America increased from 6.6 percent to 8.3 percent, the report notes.
“Netflix’s decision to optimize their entire video library will yield benefits for both subscribers and operators,” Dave Caputo, CEO at Sandvine, observes. “Netflix’s optimizations means they can deliver more hours of video using less bandwidth, which results in lower data consumption for subscribers, and decreased capacity-related costs for operators.”
The report has Amazon Video as the third ranked downstream application (up from eighth a year ago) in North America, accounting for 4.3 percent of fixed traffic. “Sling TV now appears among the top 20 applications on most US networks, but still accounts for less than 1% of traffic,” Sandvine reports.
Streaming audio and video reportedly now accounts for 71 percent of evening traffic in North American fixed access networks. Sandvine predicts this figure will reach 80 percent by 2020.
Cloud Storage (Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive, etc.) has surpassed Filesharing as the largest source of upstream traffic during peak period on North American fixed access networks, according to the report. BitTorrent now accounts for less than 5 percent of total daily traffic in the region.