Joshua Brustein reports on Businessweek the dominance of Netflix and YouTube in the online video industry.
Video always dominates these traffic surveys because of the vast amount of information required. Last year, for instance, Netflix and YouTube made up 47.8 percent of total downstream traffic what people are consuming rather than creating. This year the duo crossed the halfway point, hitting 50.3 percent. Netflix lost a bit of ground, while YouTube ticked up, but the rest of the online video pack sure doesn’t seem to be gaining much ground on the leaders.Notably lagging are two other widely discussed video services: Hulu and Amazon AMZN. Both companies are slipping from their already lowly traffic numbers: Amazon accounted for 1.6 percent of total downstream traffic in September, compared with an average of 1.75 percent in the second half of 2012. For Hulu, meanwhile, September’s 1.29 percent came up short of the 1.38 percent it captured last year.
One interesting thing of note from the report is the sharp drop in file sharing.
File sharing is losing ground. BitTorrent, the dominant file-sharing technology, accounted for only 7.4 percent of total traffic in September, down from more than 10 percent last year, and file sharing as a whole has dropped from 31 percent of traffic in 2008 to less than 10 percent today. If you want to argue that legal alternatives are the best way to cut down on piracy, this seems like a pretty compelling statistic.
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