Insatiable streamers: Cord cutters gorge on 212GB a month, keep getting hungrier

By Alex Tretbar May 14, 2014

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It appears Netflix has tightened its grip on the online video world even further. A new report from Canadian-based Sandvine shows the service once again ranked as the top downstream application in North America during peak periods with an astonishing 34.21-percent slice of the pie, up from 31.6 percent for the second half of 2013. The data comes from Sandvine’s recent Global Internet Phenomena Report. In comparison, YouTube was the next in line with a mere 13.19-percent portion.

The Netflix-related findings were secondary to Sandvine’s primary focus within the study that synthesized usage data from more than 250 ISPs worldwide. Apparently, U.S. “cord-cutters” – those who don’t pay for satellite or cable subscriptions – gorge on roughly 212GB of data per month (seven times more than the typical pay-TV subscriber’s 29GB), 153GB of which go toward “real-time entertainment usage.” The number equates to an average of 100 hours of streaming each month, Sandvine said in a blog post.

The report also indicates that Internet users, in general, are accessing increasingly larger amounts of data on a monthly basis. The overall mean usage on North American fixed-access networks (as opposed to mobile networks) was 51.4 GB in March, which is up from the 44.5 GB noted in Sandvine’s most recent previous study. Cord-cutters as a whole currently dominate network usage, accounting for a 54-percent majority of total monthly network traffic.

Today’s news comes after a report released by Sandvine in November 2013, which showed that Netflix and YouTube collectively accounted for just over 50 percent of downstream traffic on fixed networks – a massive number that continues to grow as more and more users turn to the Internet for their entertainment fix.

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Alex Tretbar, audio/video intern, is a writer, editor, musician, gamer and sci-fi nerd raised on EverQuest and Magic: The…

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