The arrival of Netflix in Australia has had a dramatic effect on web traffic patterns, but if the North American trend holds true here, Netflix will eventually become the single biggest source of download traffic.
Bandwidth usage on various Australian ISPs and peering exchanges showed a dramatic rise in usage following Netflix's official debut, with traffic on some networks up by more than 200%. Some of these traffic spikes may have even caused congestion for end-users, as many complained about unusable speeds during peak traffic times.
But over in the U.S. where Netflix usage is much more prevalent, it is a commonly accepted fact that Netflix is the single biggest bandwidth user, especially during peak viewing hours.
Canadian broadband networking company Sandvine releases a bi-annual report of downstream internet traffic in North America, and Netflix now accounts for nearly 37% of all peak web traffic. While only fixed networks (non mobile) and peak periods (during the evening) is included in the report, Netflix's 36.48%, up from 34.89% six months ago, is still substantial usage for just one platform.
The next most popular platform, YouTube, now accounts for 15.56% of all peak traffic.
And in potential good news for rights-holders, BitTorrent traffic is now only 2.76% of all peak traffic, down from 2.8% back in September 2014.
Showing the dominance of Netflix in the SVOD marketplace, other streaming competitors including Amazon (1.97%), Hulu (1.91%) and the newly launched HBO Now (0.7%) were very far behind when it came to bandwidth usage.
