Netflix Streaming Is 20 Percent of US Internet Traffic

If someone said a video streaming service accounted for 20 percent of peak American Internet traffic, you might be inclined to think it's YouTube, but you'd be wrong. It's Netflix. Yep, the same Netflix known for sending DVDs by snail mail.
The data comes from Sandvine, a bandwidth management equipment vendor who looked at downstream Internet traffic during peak usage hours. The results also showed that Netflix streaming is the single largest amount of traffic between the hours of 8p.m. and 10p.m.
With the millions of Americans using the Internet and the seemingly infinite amount of content to view, it might surprise people to learn that anything can account for one fifth of bandwidth usage at peak hours, let alone Netflix. But it's also a testament of the company's growing power in the video streaming market.
It's the same reason that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings recently said Netlix is a streaming company first and a DVD-by-mail company second. It's also why Netflix is considering offering a streaming-only subscription, which could increase the company's streaming traffic even more.
The report also gave a look at total North American Internet usage compared to Asia-Pacific usage patterns. Americans used an average of 4 gigabytes per month and had average connection times of 3 hours, while Asian users consumed 12 gigabytes of data and kept their connections active for an average of 5.5 hours.