Netflix, Youtube Surpass 50% Mark of Internet Traffic 249
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?"
Thanks Google (Score:4, Interesting)
I was indifferent about YouTube until it inexplicably linked itself to my Gmail account and now wants me to create a Google+ page in order to comment on videos. Now, I'd like nothing more to see it go up in flames, like a Tesla that hit some road debris.
Re:1st post! (Score:4, Interesting)
1 - If you like obscure stuff, chances are its not there
2 - Many people don't like to have to be "online" just to watch or listen, or read. ( and be at the mercy of the provider and what they feel like offering this month )
Youtube has a lot of full length movies (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.reddit.com/r/fullmoviesonyoutube/ [reddit.com]
PS3 in a drop down fashion are NetFlix, youtube, then of course Amazon instant videos and Red Box
showed up on the last update -4.5.
Flame: Know how time consuming it was to find that reddit link? It used to be a tab on my browser.
Yesterday I updated Opera 12 to version 17. I didn't want to lose the /. taking me to slashdot feature so put it off.
Opera doesn't have bookmarks anymore, how truly asinine is that? Nor can I disable flash, and much more.
So I don't use Opera after well since forever, but FireFox that auto log's me into a site (for the moment).
and off topic but I'm still hot over it.
Data went up... (Score:5, Interesting)
But did consumption go up or did video bit rate go up?
Maybe more people are now selecting "HD" streaming than they used to.
Re:Hoarders (Score:5, Interesting)
I was a hoarder. For me, I guess what happened was that my broadband capacity finally reached a point in which I feel comfortable with stuff being in the cloud. If I wanted to watch Star Trek six years ago on my 800Kbps connection, I'd have to torrent every episode. Then I'd burn discs because, in case I wanted to watch again, I didn't want to go through the trouble of redownloading everything - it took days. Now Netflix and Youtube mean that a lot of what I want is permanently (and readily, thanks to a 35Mbps connection) available and I have no reason to hoard anymore, so my torrenting has decreased a lot. Steam sales and Humble Bundles also meant I have essentially stopped pirating (except for good titles with annoying DRM, like Bioshock 2) - I just give it a year of two for games to come to a reasonable price and leave my library on the cloud. I think that's what happened to a lot of people - and, in third world countries, quite recently.
Re:Thanks Google (Score:5, Interesting)
Out of curiosity, why does it bother you? I consider it a great feature (the single account, not the nagging). I don't imagine it makes much of a difference to Google one way or the other with respect to information collection.
Re:Hoarders (Score:5, Interesting)
Posting as AC since I don't want the CISPA to allow a newly minted Ministry Of Copyrights to send their secret police in the near future....
I've stored over a thousand movies either from direct ripping, or downloading good encodes. I have found that on demand (Netflix) does not have a whole lot going in the movie categories. As a result, I have been watching movies again from my archives. I simply refuse to shell out a couple of bucks each time I want to watch something. Fuck them, I paid to see it in the movie theater, I paid to get the DVD copy, how much blood do they want to siphon off me? So, yes, I do store movies to watch them again, or watch them later on with friends and family. Some stuff is just classic.
It just became a way of life to never ever watch the DVD. In fact, the advertisements and POU's pissed me off so fucking much, I had to rip it first. Actually paying for it (Around 30-40% of my collection are purchases) and being told, "No. You can't skip anything here. Sit down. STFU. Watch the previews".
Right after I had the physical medium in hand I put it in my system, fired up DVD Decrypter, and made an image of the disc to be mounted afterwards and played. Plenty of media players like the WD TV Live will play an .iso file replete with DVD menus.
I don't feel that any of the time has been wasted at all. My collection is nearing 100 TB. At this point I rarely use Netflix for anything other than watching TV shows. That's it's real value to me. TV shows with no advertisements or overlays. I can wait a year till the last season is available.
The biggest failure of Big Entertainment is continuing this greedy war. My offer still stands. I will pay upwards of $50 a month for on-demand viewing of TV shows with ZERO advertisements of any kind. Any other deal they can go fuck themselves with a cactus.
P.S - I still do a brisk business with the DVDs by mail. After I download a good encode for a movie I queue it up on Netflix and quite often never take it out the package when I receive it. I'm sending them back as quick as I get them. Netflix for me is way to compensate the artists.
Re:Hoarders (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to have eight 3TB hard drives in my home server, storing all my downloaded and ripped videos.
Back when I started in 2006, it was 1TB drives, then 1.5TB drives (Frys had a deal on them back then, $115!). Then 2TB, then 3TB.
I looked at upgrading to 4TB drives, then something caused me to do the math. All the money spent to keep up with it? I could have just bought most of it on Blu-Ray and been done with it.
My local media storage is down to 6.8TB, I've deleted about 10TB worth in the past few months, waste of time, space, and money.
You know what? I don't miss any of it.
What I did keep was stuff that isn't easy to find on the popular services. I have a number of old war movies and documentaries that aren't on the various services, those I kept. I have the complete rip of 10 seasons of Modern Marvels, that is pretty cool and nice for the kids.
Blockbuster movies? Blah, I can stream those, Amazon Prime Video these days looks darn good on the big TV.
Re:I would like more information, please (Score:5, Interesting)
Not everyone who gets paid by an industry is automatically in its pocket. In this case, they gain nothing by doctoring the report.
Sandvine's numbers are taken as fact by pretty much everyone in the know. When I was in grad school, they were the ones posting the numbers saying that torrents accounted for whatever insane percentage of Internet traffic that they once accounted for (30%+, as I recall), and practically every research paper I read quoted something Sandvine had published at some point. As I recall, the reason they're able to get such accurate numbers is because their customers are the big telecoms, which gives them the sort of access they need to make these assessments. Without that sort of access, the best you could do is get some numbers from large universities, local ISPs, and CDNs. Of those, the first two wouldn't be useful in the least for extrapolating traffic patterns to the population at large, and good luck getting these sorts of numbers from the CDNs.
Look back on Sandvine's historical data and you'll see that they haven't exactly done the entrenched telecoms any favors, since they seem to just tell it like it is, time and again, regardless of what the implications may be.
75% is refreshes (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone want to bet what percentage of traffic is people refreshing the page because the youtube player got stuck again?