According to Sandvine's (TSX:SVC) "Global Internet Phenomena Report," streaming video and audio now makes up 71% of evening Internet traffic in North American fixed access networks. Sandvine expects the figure to reach 80% by 2020.
Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) represented 35.2% of traffic on North American fixed networks, Sandvine says. While this was a modest decline from the 37.1% of traffic it represented six months ago, this change is likely the result of improvements by Netflix to better compress their video library. Even with these improvements in streaming efficiency, Netflix's traffic share on fixed networks in Latin America increased from 6.6% to 8.3%.
Other findings indicate:
- Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Video is now the third ranked downstream application (up from eighth a year ago) in North America, accounting for 4.3% of fixed traffic. Sling TV now appears among the top 20 applications on most U.S. networks, but still accounts for less than 1% of traffic.
- Cloud Storage (Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive, etc.) has surpassed Filesharing as the largest source of upstream traffic during peak period on North American fixed access networks. BitTorrent now accounts for less than 5% of total daily traffic in the region.
- The addition of video and voice calling is driving growth in communications apps on mobile networks in both Latin America and North America. In Latin America, WhatsApp traffic share is now 7.4%, more than triple what it was two years ago.
- In Latin America, Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) account for more than 70% of total mobile traffic in the region, up from 60% reported last year.
- More than 60% of mobile traffic in both Latin America and North America is now encrypted, and Sandvine predicts some networks will surpass 80% this year.
