ΠMany of us would bet that Youtube is the service that is responsible for the largest traffic and consumption of data on the World Wide Web. And of course we would have lost the bet, as Netflix is the largest data distributor right now, putting Youtube in third place.
According to the research Global Internet Phenomena conducted by Sandvine, Netflix is now responsible for 15% of global Internet traffic and of course occupies the first place position in the relevant category. Equally impressive is the fact that this volume of data could have tripled if the service's video files had not been optimized (by compression).
As an example, Sandvine is looking at the movie Hot Fuzz on various streaming services. The file has a size from 1.86GB in standard resolution to 4.6GB in high resolution. On Amazon Prime, movies of similar length take up about 1.5GB, however, on Netflix the file size is only 459MB!
If you're surprised that Netflix alone could be responsible for this amount of data circulating on the Internet, just think that during peak hours it can rise to 40% in the US alone. In addition, Sandvine points out that 4K resolution content takes up little of its research, so Netflix numbers are expected to grow even more when the majority of the world upgrades its systems (TVs, set-top boxes, etc.) to monitors in 4K resolution.
In second place after Netflix comes with 13.1% a series of various video services characterized as "HTTP Media Streams" and in third place is YouTube with 11.4%. Social networks occupy 5.1%, gaming 7.8% and general web browsing 17%.
