Streaming Audio, Video Account for 70% of North America Bandwidth Traffic, Sandvine Says

Streaming video and audio account for more than 70 percent of North America's downstream Internet traffic in peak hours on fixed access networks, Sandvine said in a news release Monday. That's up from less than 35 percent five years ago, Sandvine said. The three top sources of video traffic on North American fixed access networks -- Netflix at 37.1 percent, Google's YouTube at 17.9 percent and Amazon Video at 3.1 percent -- all had an increase in traffic share over the course of the year, Sandvine said, and Netflix now has a bigger share of traffic than all streaming audio and video did five years ago. The growth in streaming video is driving down the share of fixed access bandwidth taken up by BitTorrent, from about 7 percent a year ago to 5 percent now, Sandvine said. The data comes from Sandvine's Global Internet Phenomena Report.