Netflix accounts for 35% of North American web traffic

Netflix represents 35.2% of peak period downstream traffic on North American fixed internet networks, according to new research by broadband network solutions firm Sandvine.

The 2016 Global Internet Phenomena report for Latin America and North America said the 35.2% figure was a modest decline from the 37.1% of traffic Netflix represented six months, which Sandvine attributed to encoding improvements made by Netflix.

“Earlier in the year, Netflix began implementing ‘Per-Title Encode Optimisation’ which saw Netflix re-encode their entire library with a focus on being more efficient in order to deliver what they claim is a ‘same or better experience while using less bandwidth’,” according to the report.

“Sandvine believes Netflix’s bandwidth share decline is tied to the new encoding techniques, and that this implementation is a tremendous win for subscribers and operators since Netflix video will now use fewer network resources, resulting in an overall better experience.”

The study said YouTube accounted for the second-greatest amount of downstream traffic at 17.5%, followed by Amazon video in third place with 4.3%.

Meanwhile BitTorrent’s traffic share continues to decline, accounting for “less than 3% of total traffic during peak period, and only 5% of total traffic during the day,” which Sandvine said was a “sharp decline” from the 31% of total traffic it represented in 2008.

“With this decline in filesharing, storage applications – for example iCloud, Dropbox, Google Cloud – have surpassed filesharing as the leading upstream traffic category on fixed networks,” said Sandvine.