The average data consumption of the world is rapidly increasing and Netflix is seeing a huge demand surge.
The news comes from Canadian network firm Sandvine. In their new “Global Internet Phenomena” report, the company found that 36.5 percent of all download traffic in North America at peak time in the evening is coming from Netflix servers.
The Washington Post notes how this is a substantial increase from Sandvine’s last report in November. Back then, Netflix accounted for 34.9 percent of traffic in the evening. The streaming company has seen a 1.6 percent increase in downloads in just seven months.
The statistics surrounding Netflix are astounding, as highlighted by DMR’s recent article on the company. Netflix now has over 60 million subscribers, 40 million of which are in the US. Collectively, those subscribers spend 10 billion hours watching videos every month and 36 percent of US homes have a subscription to the service.
For many people, Netflix has now replaced their TV or is used more frequently than it. The company’s selection of in-house series have proved to be exceptionally popular with shows like House of Cards and Game of Thrones becoming some of the defining programs of the decade.
The service has at least a petabyte’s worth of films and TV shows available for on-demand streaming from its fleet of storage servers, each holding 100 to 150 terabytes of content. The company made $1.4 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2015.
Sandvine’s report also contains some other interesting details about our usage of the Internet. Facebook and Google are responsible for over 60 percent of total mobile traffic in Latin America. The release of the Ascendance DLC for hit gaming title Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare led to substantial usage spike, with one North American provider seeing 12 percent of its network in use downloading the game.
