Remember that Sandvine report published five months ago that called Netflix the "king" of North American fixed download Internet data? That survey estimated the online video company's share at 29.7 percent of all peak download time, a 44 percent boost in Netflix's share of traffic since 2010.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/netflix-now-owns-almost-30-percent-of-north-american-fixed-internet-traffic.arsWell, Sandvine has issued another estimate. Netflix now accounts for 32.7 percent of all North American peak fixed access downstream content. That's a relative increase of almost ten percent since the spring, and it puts Netflix way beyond the the other three top Internet protocols or services by daily volume—approaching double HTTP (17.48 percent), just shy of three times YouTube (11.32), and nearly four times BitTorrent.
This fact is of particular importance to network operators, since it means that most video traffic adapts to network congestion by shifting to lower bitrates and quality, which impacts the subscriber quality of experience," the network management company suggests in its latest Global Internet Phenomena Report. "From a network engineering perspective, it means that when capacity is increased, adaptive video simply upshifts to a higher fidelity and fills the new capacity."
Then there's another question: How much more of North America's fixed peak download share can Netflix claim? Has the company peaked?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/10/netflix-accounts-for-nearly-one-third-of-north-american-web-traffic.ars