With fast internet connections and HD video growing ever more common, it's no surprise that data heavy video streaming constitutes a huge proportion of 'downstream' internet traffic. The latest Sandvine Internet Phenomena Report - available online here - reveals that Netflix and YouTube continue to dominate internet connections in Europe and North America.
In Europe, YouTube represents a peak traffic share of 28.73% on fixed internet connections. Although the continental average share for Netflix is a lower 3.45%, the service has only launched in a handful of European markets, and the share increases to 20% for the British isles. This means the service now represents a fifth of all traffic received by UK customers is via Netflix, which only launched there (and in Ireland) in January 2012.
In North America, Netflix's share is a huge 31.62%, with YouTube trailing behind at 18.69%. This marks a slight decrease in traffic share for the former, although Sandvine points out they expect this to rise in their first 2014 report as "the bulk of data collection for this report occurred before Netflix made SuperHD content available to all subscribers". SuperHD, meaning the high quality video available on the service, can see up to 50% more data streamed that standard high definition streaming. Hulu, Amazon Video and iTunes also rank in the North American top ten.
File-sharing protocol BitTorrent tops the 'upstream' share in both regions - 48.10% for Europe and 36.35% for North America - although its downstream share has declined significantly (to 10.10% and 4.05%, respectively). Despite being considerably less data intensive than video sites, Facebook also makes the top ten traffic sources in both territories, including a huge 4.94% share in Europe.
The popularity of Facebook sees it easily dominate the mobile traffic rankings. In North America, it tops the upstream mobile traffic list with 20.62%, and is second only to YouTube for downstream (15.44%). In Europe, it is overall surpassed by YouTube (18.51%) and general HTTP traffic (22.65%) in terms of combined upstream and downstream traffic, but still manages an 11.80% share for third place.
