Sandvine Report Shows Netflix Dominating During North American Peak Hours

We obviously do a lot of different things on the Internet each and every, but when the peak hours between 9PM and 12AM arrive, it's all about Netflix baby. A new report from Sandvine shows that in North America, Netflix is responsible for 33% of the downstream traffic on fixed networks between those hours. That's good enough, but Sandvine's report also says that 65% of all downstream traffic during those hours is coming from video and audio streaming sites, meaning Netflix is responsible for half of that.

In Europe, it's a bit of a different story there, as YouTube accounts for 20% of all downstream traffic during peak hours on both fixed and mobile networks. It probably won't come as much of a surprise that video streaming sites take up most of the downstream traffic during peak hours, but what's interesting is that Netflix takes so much share for itself. Amazon, Hulu, and HBO Go were all mentioned in Sandvine's report, but they only respectively account for 1.8%, 1.4%, and 0.5% of downstream traffic on North American fixed networks during peak hours.

Hearing that, it's immediately clear just how strong Netflix is in North America. All in all, Sandvine says that mean monthly data usage on North American fixed networks has risen quite a bit, jumping from 23GB to 51GB in just one year. That's an increase of 120%, and we can probably expect that to climb even higher as more people begin turning to the Internet for their video content.

Sandvine, which calls itself a "leading provider of intelligent broadband network solutions for fixed and mobile operators," collected this data from a selection of its 200 customers around the world. It's an interesting study to say the least, and we'll be even more interested to see where these numbers are a year from now. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, Sandvine is predicting that the 2014 World Cup will be the most-streamed event in Internet history.