Netflix Dominates North American Internet

nairnr writes "Accounting for 29.7% of all information downloaded during peak usage hours by North American broadband-connected households in March, Netflix Inc. received the title in the latest Global Internet Phenomena Report released by Sandvine Corp. on Tuesday. In its ninth such report, Waterloo, Ont.-based Sandvine found the amount of data consumed by users streaming television shows and movies from Netflix's online service exceeded even that of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing technology BitTorrent."

It only makes sense

[whoami-ky]

Gee, they actually made it MORE convenient and people are willing to pay for it. Compare this to what the movie/tv studios do on a regular basis. They make it harder to get the content and people tend to find alternative sources.

What about Linux?

[JMonty42]

Think what that percentage would be if they supported Linux, too.

The Real Netflix Fix

[Nom du Keyboard]

The real Netflix fix, instead of streaming the movie within the tight constraints and impaired quality necessary to prevent buffering, would be for me to order up the movie I wanted that morning like I order up DVD's from them, have them remove a previous movie to make room for the new one, and then d/l it over the day. By the time I'm home in the evening, even a slow DSL line could have a true DVD-level copy available for watching without interruption. The next morning I order another movie or two and the old ones are deleted as part of the new ones arriving. Seriously, this would be such an improvement over the existing system and the expense of mailing much better quality DVDs could go away entirely.

Why they are adding caps- Can't blame Torrent

[commodore64_love]

This is good. It means they can no longer say, "Bittorrent is saturating our lines! We need Congress to ban these pirates." Now the blame is falling on LEGAL watching, and there's no way they can get Congress to ban legal usage of videos.

So instead they are implementing 150 GB caps. :-|

Bastards.

Re:Netflix

[dgatwood]

To be fair, there's no reason you couldn't use a staggered broadcast approach for Netflix and get the same user experience if you did it right.

• When a user requests a movie, begin streaming the content from the beginning.
• Simultaneously add the user to the most recent multicast group for that movie.
• When the per-user stream catches up with the point at which the user's machine joined the multicast stream, you no longer need to stream data to that user because the user has all of the data from that point in the stream all the way up to the current point in the multicast stream.
• At the end of the transfer, the client could then re-fetch any missing chunks.

Such an approach would dramatically reduce the traffic overhead, at the expense of a little additional code running on the user's machine.

Re:The Real Netflix Fix

[The Good Reverend]

Studios have put up with streaming because it's generally NOT able to be saved in the embedded and proprietary systems it's used in. Anything that saved locally wouldn't adhere to current copyright agreements, so it's not gonna happen.

The lights aren't all on upstairs,

[westlake]

Gee, they actually made it MORE convenient and people are willing to pay for it. Compare this to what the movie/tv studios do on a regular basis. They make it harder to get the content and people tend to find alternative sources.

Hello!

The studios are the providers - Netflix is one of their licensed distributors.

Better still, the Netflix "app" is on the HDTV, video game console and set top box. The PC is sidelined and with it the BT client.

Ya I know, what a fucking surprise

[Sycraft-fu]

So wait, you give consumers what they want for a reasonable price, and they'll pay for it? Who would have thought! One can hope they'll learn from this, but somehow I suspect not :P.

Re:Multicast? What's that?

[Machtyn]

I know my kids (2yo & 4yo) all watch the SAME DARN PROGRAMS over and over. They could just store those videos on my device/computer and use it as a p2p node. Let me know the videos are stored there, encrypt the data, so I can't copy it willy/nilly, and everyone is happy (I get faster access to those programs, they get a "free" node).

Of course, the kids use the Wii, so there isn't a lot of space to put the video. However, they could easily use the extra hard drive space on any one of my 3 computers.

I think the GP has a point, if Netflix is not already using a torrent-like technology, they really should look into developing that tech. (As the video streams data, it could pull from other users watching the same program. Once it catches up or becomes the lead viewer, it switches back to pulling data from a Netflix supernode.)

Granted this could be bad for capped Internet subscribers and I'm not sure how it would reduce network traffic - unless they allow the creation of user nodes, but it will probably improve the end-user experience.