Netflix is a media services provider, headquartered in California. With 130 million users (27 million added in 2017 alone), the site is regarded as the top traffic contributor of the internet, followed by browsing and gaming.
With a global market share of 26.58 percent, Netflix owns at least 15 percent of all downlink traffic of the internet, worldwide, according to 'The Global Internet Phenomena Report October 2018' report by Sandvine, a network equipment company.
Netflix experienced an increased revenue in Q2 of 2018 to as high as 43 percent year-over-year, and also an increased operating margin of 11.6 percent, and expanded 720 bps year-over-year.
On the other hand, BitTorrent which provides a P2P file-sharing protocol holds the top position for upstreaming traffic with 22 percent market share. Most of this is due to exclusive contents tied to: Game of Thrones for HBO, Narcos for Netflix, Jack Ryan for Amazon and The Handmaid’s Tale for Hulu.
Sandvine report about torrenting shows that piracy in 2017-2018 is still popular.
With the underlying technologies that power the internet becoming more advanced, and also with more and more people are going online for the first time, online services like Netflix are going to continue growing.
Netflix has been investing heavily in creating shows for local audiences of different countries. It is also experimenting with interactive shows which allow viewers to choose their own path, enticing them to stay on the platform for a longer period of time.
Sandvine clarified that the data it gathered didn't include data from Chine and India, which are regarded as the two biggest internet consumer countries in the world. The numbers might be significantly different for the likes of Netflix if more granular data from these two countries is included.
Other findings by Sandvine include:
- 40.2 percent of all connections in the Asia-Pacific region are connected to Google services.
- 50 percent of the internet traffic is encrypted.
- World Cup games were the #1 downstream bandwidth consumer on both fixed and mobile networks.
- Instagram is the social network with the most traffic, followed by Facebook.
- Skype is the top messaging app, followed by WhatsApp.
- Spotify is the most popular music streaming services.
- League of Legends is the top game, followed by Epic Games’ Fortnite.