Netflix, Youtube Surpass 50% Mark of Internet Traffic

First time accepted submitter sqorbit writes "Netflix and Youtube are gaining ground not only on the competition, such as Amazon, but also over peer-to-peer file sharing. Netflix claims more than 30 million customers and believes it could double that number in the future. Traffic from Netflix and Youtube amounted to over 50% of Internet traffic in September. Meanwhile Bittorrent traffic is down slightly (7.4% from 10%) in Internet traffic compared to last year. Could more people be satisfied with current video offerings or are less people finding useful things to download via file sharing?"

Re:Thanks Google

[Forever Wondering]

Sounds like you're logged into gmail when you go to youtube.

Logout [of gmail] first [possibly clearing some cookies] and you'll have no problem. I have a gmail account [but I only access it through POP3/IMAP from thunderbird--thus, it's never logged in] and I don't have the same problem. I did have the same problem one time when I was logged into gmail.

If you'd rather not logout/login on gmail repeatedly, you can create a separate browser profile [Firefox, at least] for youtube, etc.

I would like more information, please

[PopeRatzo]

If you click a few levels through the story, you'll find that the data comes from Sandvine, whose customers are the big telecoms. Considering the battle over net neutrality, I'd say that Sandvine is not a neutral source in this discussion.

I'd like to see data from some other sources on "Netflix and Youtube are half of all Internet traffic".

Re:Enjoy it while you can

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you missed this little tidbit. [arstechnica.com]

Re:26 percent != "slightly"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a drop in torrent traffic, it's a drop in percentage. It could have gone up on an absolute scale, but if the total grew faster, then the percentage that it occupies still goes down.

Re:Thanks Google

[Inda]

I never log out of Gmail and Google stopped hassling me about linking YouTube or using my real name a while back. One browser, rarely clear cookies.

Mountains out of mole hills.

Re:The thing about relative measures...

[Unknown1337]

Exactly what I was thinking. Netflix has expanded its coverage of HD and 'super HD' while Youtube has increased the quality/resolution of its content as well. Increased quality comes with increased data transfer, while a 700MB file will always transmit 700MB. The customer base has probably grown and there is likely some relationship between the cost effective viewing and increased usage of these services, but overall they are simply sending more data for the same content which makes this a nearly irrelevant thing to measure. It would be like proving global warming by switching to Fahrenheit when you used to use Celsius... it just doesn't add up and the 2 are not comparable without conversion.