
Netflix Now The Largest Single Source of Internet Traffic In North America - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/17/netflix-largest-internet-traffic/
======
Lewisham
I hope we can now have the MPAA and RIAA realize that, actually, most people
_do_ want to pay, they _don't_ choose to pirate because they are all
inherently bad, and they don't need to be sued from the face of the Earth to
show how bad they are.

What changed is what the customers value, and how much they will pay for it.
The $9 I spend a month on Netflix is $108 a year, which is far more than I
have paid for DVDs in the past. I don't value owning physical media or
individual movies, I value streaming and libraries.

But, of course, why change now? Why should the RIAA bother trying to get
Spotify-like services launched in the US? Who needs evidence and metrics when
you can have vitriol and blame?

~~~
leftnode
You're exactly right and this really hammered it home for me; the generation
today is not into owning a physical piece of media.

In the 70's, owning an LP was awesome (and necessary) because there was
usually some effort put into the artwork. Today, no one wants to own a mass
produced DVD/BluRay Disc with shitty artwork and no liner notes.

Some CD's still come with good artwork, but the generation now values owning
digital media.

~~~
Unseelie
> the generation now values owning digital media I think you've missed the
> point, it isn't about ownership at all, or even that the media is digital.
> Its that what we value is access to the media. We're willing to pay a
> nominal fee for access to it, but that's really all we care about: Having
> the media play when we want it to. Ownership of the media is irrelevant to
> our experience of the media...unless not owning it means we cannot
> experience it.

~~~
Lewisham
Yes, this was what I was getting at. I don't want or need to have some
physical object that tells me "this is my media". We've been through enough
format changes to understand that "this is my media for ten years, then I'll
need to convert it or buy it again." Access is the key, not ownership.

That being said, I am deeply concerned about central media control allowing
companies and governments to become revisionist; editing out controversial
portions of various works as they see fit. I would like to see legislation
that would prevent that.

~~~
Blarat
>We've been through enough format changes to understand that "this is my media
for ten years, then I'll need to convert it or buy it again." Access is the
key, not ownership.

I guess this is what the RIAA/MPAA doesn't like with the streaming business,
they can't resell the same material every time a new standard comes out.

------
pstack
I can't wait to see this all come to a head. Netflix's CEO isn't shy about
calling the industry out on their bullshit, while the industry continues to
lie about available bandwidth -- insisting that it is very limited, near
maximum capacity, and very expensive (none of which is intrinsically true and
only artificially so by their own machinations).

Netflix could end up doing a lot of good for the consumer beyond just
providing entertainment at an affordable price, at the rate they're going.

------
megamark16
It's certainly the largest single source of internet traffic at our house, and
within that subset, streaming Dora the Explorer Season 1 is the largest single
source of internet traffic coming from Netflix.

~~~
kenjackson
I literally know about four or five people that have Netflix almost purely to
stream Dora and Thomas.

~~~
ktsmith
Our netflix usage is 99.5% kids shows. Pretty much all the PBS cartoons are on
there, NOVA Science now is on there, Thomas and Friends, Dora the Explorer
etc. We use hundreds of GB every month streaming media and have no plans on
going back to cable or satellite. My wife can get some of her shows via hulu
at her desk, some of them on the TV and if she is patient she'll get a whole
season at once on netflix.

That being said, we'd use even more bandwidth with Netflix if their on demand
streaming selection didn't suck for more recent releases. I don't watch a ton
of older movies and those I do want to watch over and over again I own on DVD
or Bluray which I would prefer to use since the quality is better and there's
never any buffering problems.

~~~
adamc
Not to mention that young kids will watch shows over and over and over again.
When my daughter (now 11) was that age, we mostly used DVDs, but these days
netflix would be a fabulous investment for meeting that need.

~~~
ktsmith
Beyond watching the same thing over and over again, his tastes will change
suddenly. We've gone through a phase where he was into nothing but Toy Story,
followed shortly by Cars, then back to Toy Story, then Thomas, and now back to
Cars. We aren't purchasing nearly as many DVDs as I had anticipated because
he's perfectly happy watching Hero of the Rails or Misty Island Rescue another
time and both are streaming. By having a variety of kids shows available we
are also saving quite a bit on disc replacement costs. He can work the PS3 but
doesn't really get that touching the bottom of the $30 Bluray discs is not a
good idea.

~~~
megamark16
Oh man, Misty Island Rescue is one of my son's favorites. He's on a Leapfrog
kick right now, but we'll see how long that lasts.

------
jasonmcalacanis
If find it hard to believe that the free YouTube, which gets 500M uniques a
month--over 100k in the US alone--gets less traffic than Netflix with 23m
members.

US traffic stats <http://www.quantcast.com/youtube.com>
<http://www.quantcast.com/netflix.com> 11m (obviously doesn't count xbox and
apps, etc)

Really minutes spent is the most important factor to look at. with 5x the
uniques, and being free, I wonder how total minutes spent with netflix content
compares to youtube's.

~~~
scott_s
Usages are completely different. People look at a few YouTube videos in a
given day, usually at low quality for a few minutes. Some people, like me and
many people I know, have completely replaced cable and network tv with
Netflix. Streaming an episode of Lost at 720p is going to take up a lot of
bandwidth.

~~~
brianpan
Agreed, it's bandwidth and the duration. In our household, we watch many 20-40
minute shows in a day. Probably a total of 2-10 hours depending on the day. We
also watch lots of youtube videos, but it's 1-5 minute videos which amount to
a total of 30 minutes or an hour a day.

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yalogin
And it does not even have the latest movies available for streaming. By latest
I mean good interesting movies released in the last year or two. It does
better with TV shows but still does not have many shows. All I am saying is
the traffic is only going to go up.

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thematt
I find these benchmarks slightly confusing. There are protocols/technologies
mixed in with applications (or sites). Isn't there going to be huge overlap in
these? Facebook vs. HTTP? Flash video vs. YouTube?

~~~
corin_
My assumption is that it's shorthand, as in "HTTP" actually means "HTTP
excluding <others on list>". Could be wrong.

~~~
ericmoritz
Likely what they mean by HTTP is HTML(and related) over HTTP

------
mey
Interesting what AWS can do at scale. Also important to design for the system
limitations.

Edit: rewrite

~~~
mdasen
Netflix isn't using AWS for their bandwidth. The media files themselves are
being served by Level 3's CDN ([http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/11/11/us-
levelthree-idUS...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/11/11/us-levelthree-
idUSTRE6AA3IQ20101111)). Netflix is using Amazon for a lot of their
application servers, but when you're serving as much bandwidth as Netflix is,
you go with a CDN for media distribution.

That's not to say AWS is bad or anything, just that AWS isn't supporting all
that bandwidth for Netflix.

~~~
chopsueyar
Are the files encrypted before placement on the CDN or does the CDN handle the
DRM?

~~~
LokiSnake
I believe the processing (and probably encryption) is done before the CDN
using EC2 or some similar service.

------
danohuiginn
"That puts Netflix above HTTP websites (18 percent), BitTorrent (11 percent),
and YouTube (10 percent) as a source of downstream traffic during peak times
in North America. (BitTorrent still accounts for half of all upstream
traffic)"

I don't understand this -- surely every downstream requires a corresponding
upstream? Are they only counting upstream from domestic users? Or is the vast
majority of bittorrent traffic to american users coming from seeders outside
the US?

~~~
beaumartinez
Upstream: sending data. Downstream: receiving data.

With HTTP and media streaming you send very little data ("I'd like this web
page, please") and you receive lots ("here's the entire content of the web
page"). With BitTorrent you send lots of data (fragments of files to other
peers) and you receive lots (the fragments of files you're missing).

~~~
koenigdavidmj
With HTTP you still send an ACK for every incoming packet. A friend of mine at
university was the technically minded person at his fraternity, and he found
that just the outgoing ACK:s were saturating the DSL line.

Media streaming might be done over UDP, depending on the protocol, which
should alleviate this a bit.

~~~
Dylan16807
You don't need an ACK for _every_ incoming packet. But even if you send that
many you're looking at 40-64 bytes out per 1400+ bytes in.

~~~
koenigdavidmj
And now I have my stupid typo all over the Internet under my real name. How
embarrassing. (Worse---I work for a network appliances company!)

------
ck2
So since netflix is being the single best provider with virtually no "all you
can eat" competitors and their userbase is ever growing - how long until a
price increase?

At 25 million subscribers, means for every $1 increase they will get another
$300 Million a year. That's too tempting to resist, no?

~~~
ktsmith
At $8/mo I have no problem with paying for Netflix for what I can get out of
it right now. We get all of our sons content from Netflix and my wife can get
some of the TV shows she liks from Netflix. I would probably pay up to $10/mo
for what is currently available. However I would be really aware of every
price increase due to the fact that 99.9% of what I want to watch is DVD only.
It sounds crazy since $10/mo isn't really that much money, but anything over
that and I'd probably cancel the service due to the poor selection of recent
titles and the only "ok" quality of the video stream.

edit: I should add that we are on the verge of cancelling Hulu due to the
large number of device restrictions. We don't care much for the back catalog
of shows or movies so there's no value in that. When we also can't stream a
show to the TV and have to watch it on the PC that's a disincentive to use the
product.

------
Apocryphon
List of products/services that show that crusading anti-piracy media
publishing companies are full of it: Netflix, Steam, Hulu, O'Reilly Media,
that one anime streaming service that was covered previously by Ars
Technica... who else?

------
tobylane
iPlayer is the British equal (not equivalent -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Uni...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_United_Kingdom))
with no recent data, and they intend on expanding at the ISPs cost
[http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/2010/11/18/bbc-system-to-
na...](http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/2010/11/18/bbc-system-to-name-and-
shame-uk-isps-that-throttle-iplayer-broadband-traffic.html)

------
romey
I wonder if this data will change anything about the argument for net
neutrality? The big telecom companies were already complaining about companies
like netflix, skype, google etc. making huge piles of money by driving lots
traffic and pulling lots of bandwidth for users; I'm sure Comcast wouldn't
mind being able to charge customers a premium for a "Comcast Netflix package"
with faster movie loading times, etc.

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alienfluid
Thinking about this from a technical point of view, would it make sense for
Netflix (or even ISPs) to put in content-aware routers than can cache
frequently requested bits?

Won't this help, to a certain extent, alleviate the congestion? Of course, the
assumption here is that for a large enough population, you will have more than
one person requesting the same content in a given time period.

~~~
squeed
At least two of Netflix's three CDNs place servers or connections within the
ISPs. Akamai has servers deployed within almost every ISP, and Limelight has
peering connections to their datacenters. I'm not sure about Level3 (and
they've been pretty tight-lipped given the Comcast brouhaha).

Rather than caching on the router side, I believe most of the magic happens in
the load-balancing side. The effect (to the end-user) is the same, though.

------
d0ne
Interesting to note that Google ( Youtube was known to loose money so I am not
including it for the rest of this comment ) is no where to be found but FB is
on all 3 list. FB isn't getting more $ per ad than Google ( probably less )
but their underlying technical cost to handle an individual users is
apparently far greater.

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mattraibert
> most of the video to the home is cached on the edge of the network rather
> than going through the backbone.

I'd like to know more about what this means exactly. Do they have complete
copies of their streaming library all over the place so that everyone is
downloading from a relatively local source?

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code_duck
'Facebook' is something that can be compared to 'HTTP' or 'ssl'? That second
chart is deplorable. Whomever created that needs to go to some sort of
remedial school to study making sense.

------
kahawe
Over here in Euroland, we can only cry ourselves to sleep until they finally
stream movies over here!

Could we please ditch the pre-historic distribution and TV stations already
and switch to a more demand-oriented paradigm?

~~~
JoeP
I know it sounds like a pain in the ass, but I've got a somewhat stable
solution.

Invest in a good VPN with several US based end-points (I like StrongVPN
myself) which by itself will allow you to watch normal Hulu. I personally then
go a little further and use a US based mail forwarder (which I use for several
other things, not just this) to sign up for Hulu+ and Netflix.

It costs me about $20 per month, plus the standard cost of Hulu+ and Netflix
obviously.

~~~
OPAS
That's a great idea! Why is it costing you $20/month? You can get a US
forwarding address with no monthly maintenance fee here:
<http://bit.ly/f4v9Je>

