Streaming dominates Internet traffic
On-demand video, including ‘e-sports,’ makes up 70% of peak download volume
The phenomenon of people watching other people play video games online is “making waves” in the surging market for streamed web content, a new study says.
Broadband services firm Sandvine in a report Monday said “e-sports” market leader Twitch accounted for 4 per cent of all Internet traffic on a typical U.S. operator’s network during a weekend last August as more than two million viewers tuned in for big competitive tournaments.
On a typical day, the start-up that lets viewers broadcast, stream and comment on electronic gaming in real time says it has 1.8 per cent of peak U.S. Internet traffic.
Sandvine says Twitch is now generating greater volumes than HBOGO in the United States, while separate research from DeepField shows the Amazon unit has become the fourth-largest source of U.S. Internet volumes, behind only Netflix, Google and Apple.
Streaming of competitive video gaming “continues to gain momentum,” Sandvine said in its Internet traffic trends update, noting that Google recently launched a service that competes with Twitch called YouTube Gaming.
Streaming in general has taken over the Internet and now accounts for more than 70 per cent of North American downloads at peak times, up from less than 35 per cent in 2010, according to the report from Waterloo-based Sandvine.
Twitch, the market leader in online video-game streaming, says it has 1.8 per cent of peak U.S. web traffic on a typical day
It says Netflix takes the lion’s share of Internet downloads, with the U.S.based streaming service accounting for 37.1 per cent of all downstream traffic in North America during September and October.
YouTube accounted for the secondlargest share at17.9 per cent, followed by Internet browsing at 6.1 per cent.
As streaming sites have risen in popularity, the BitTorrent file-sharing service — which some blame for the proliferation of pirated content online — has declined in its share of overall Internet traffic.
BitTorrent still accounts for more than a quarter of upload traffic, which is substantially lower than download traffic, in part because of its peer-to-peer design, which sees users share parts of files with each other.
Yet the file-sharing service now accounts for less than 5 per cent of total Internet traffic, down from 31 per cent in 2008. Despite data caps and small screens, audio and video streaming also account for the biggest slice of mobile Internet traffic, making up 36.98 per cent of overall traffic at peak times.
YouTube was the biggest contributor to mobile downloads, followed by Facebook and web browsing.
“Streaming video has grown at such a rapid pace in North America that the leading service in 2015, Netflix, now has a greater share of traffic than all of streaming audio and video did five years ago,” Dave Caputo, Sandvine’s CEO, said in a statement.
“With Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Video and Hulu increasing their share since our last report, it further underscores both the growing role these streaming services play in the lives of subscribers, and the need for service providers to have solutions to help deliver a quality experience when using them.”