Netflix traffic, be it movies or TV shows streamed over the wires, now accounts for close to 30% of Net activity in U.S. homes in peak evening hours, according to a study by hardware/software net traffic experts Sandvine Inc.
In total, the "real time entertainment" share of Net traffic, which includes Netflix, takes up 49.2%--basically half of data flowing into homes. Web activity, presumably covering all other use cases including reading digital news sources or accessing social network resources, takes up less than 17%. We're imagining the remaining 50% is taken up by digital traffic of other types like playing online games, reading email, making Skype calls, illegal file-sharing and so on ... but the fact that a single provider has grabbed 30% of Net traffic is amazing. Around 25% of homes with a broadband connection subscribe to Netflix, but the traffic-heavy nature of the service explains its larger share of the Net traffic compared to low-data-burden uses like email.
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