Sandvine: Netflix Traffic Share Falls, But Still Dwarfs Rivals'

Networking vendor Sandvine just released its latest Internet Phenomena report, focusing on broadband traffic trends in the Americas.

This edition of the study found that Netflix's share of traffic on North American fixed networks was down almost 2% when compared to the same figure six months ago. The company believes it is a result of Netflix compressing video more efficiently.

Netflix has been working on a more effective approach to minimizing its bit rates for several years. In 2015 the company announced that it had been developing a per-title approach to bit rate selection, i.e., that the bit rate would be selected based on the individual requirements of every single title in its library.

It had found that simply using adaptive bit-rate streaming wasn't optimizing the trade-off between quality and bandwidth. For example animated content can be compressed far more than action films. In fact, even different episodes of the same series could be encoded at different bit-rates. The company believed this granular, individual per-title encoding determination could reduce bandwidth requirements by 20%. Given the company's plans to expand into 130 new countries this year, it was important to minimize bit-rates and ensure a good experience even in countries where broadband speeds are much slower than the US.

Thankfully this determination wasn't done manually; Netflix reached out to the University of Southern California, the University of Nantes and the University of Texas at Austin to develop specialized technology for this process.

For weary US network operators, however, the 2% decline may not be what they were hoping for, and the network impact of OTT video will continue to keep them up at night.

Sandvine's other findings aren't comforting either: Amazon Video rose from eighth to third in terms of fixed network traffic generated in North America. And Sling TV entered the top 20 for the first time. But the gulf between them and Netflix is sizeable: Netflix accounts for 35.2% of all traffic while Amazon contributes 4.3% and Sling just 1%.

Taken together, streaming audio and video are now generating more than 70% of evening traffic on fixed networks, and Sandvine expects this figure will reach 80% over the next four years. And that's against a background of overall traffic growth on ISP networks, with Cisco forecasting Internet traffic will reach 2.3 ZB per year by 2020.

The video explosion continues...

— Aditya Kishore, Practice Leader, Video Transformation, Telco Transformation