Netflix Biggest Source of Internet Traffic

The online video pioneer's success points to a growing demand for streaming content.

Streaming movies and television shows on the online entertainment platform Netflix now takes up more of North America's bandwidth during peak evening hours than web browsing or peer-to-peer file transferring. A study concludes that Netflix makes up 30 per cent of all internet traffic during evenings, suggesting more and more Canadians and Americans are moving their viewing habits online. Web browsing took up just 17 per cent, although just six months ago it and peer-to-peer transferring used more bandwidth than Netflix, which was introduced in Canada last fall. Netflix and other video sites require a lot of bandwidth to deliver higher-quality streams, which has been partly blamed by Canadian telecom companies for why they want to charge on a per-gigabyte basis.