|| Author: Kim LaCapria|Tags:

Netflix Gobbles a Third of Peak Bandwidth

netflix bandwidth

Although Netflix is bleeding customers at a higher rate than was originally expected, the video streaming service still accounts for a huge amount of bandwidth usage in North America.

Earlier this week, the 2011 Sandvine Internet Phenomena Report was released, citing Netflix as the biggest consumer of web bandwidth at 28% of all traffic in the US. The video streaming service is responsible for 32.7% of peak downstream traffic, up 10% since the Spring despite well-publicized subscriber losses in the wake of the unpopular price hike in September.

The Sandvine report says that while Netflix is unlikely to suffer in the long-term from the loss of users, the service may plateau after maxing out its potential for new growth:

“With so many Netflix-capable devices, the addressable market for the service is already enormous and will only increase, so it’s hard to envision a scenario in which absolute levels of Netflix will decline. However, Netflix is facing increased local competition, and as a result new services might grow at a faster rate. Globally, Netflix will grow – the service is available in almost 50 countries and the company is aggressively pursuing licensing deals with locally-focused content–but in the United States specifically, we might have seen the peak.”

The full report can be downloaded here.