Netflix Now Accounts for 36.5% of North American Bandwidth Consumed During Prime Time

Mental health and population surveys should soon be pretty interesting. JL

Brian Fung reports in the Washington Post:

Both the season five premiere of "Game of Thrones" and the most recent "Call of Duty" downloadable content led to massive spikes in data consumption.
Netflix's share of Internet traffic is exploding. The streaming service now accounts for 36.5 percent of all bandwidth consumed by North American Web users during primetime, according to the Canada-based network firm Sandvine. That's way up from even last November, when Sandvine estimated Netflix's bandwidth footprint at 34.9 percent of Internet traffic.
Sandvine's regular reports on Internet usage — based on traffic as it passes through its systems — have become a reliable indicator of which services are taking up the most bandwidth. Both the season five premiere of "Game of Thrones" and the most recent "Call of Duty" downloadable content led to massive spikes in data consumption, the latest report also finds.
But it's the Netflix numbers that are the most striking, if only because demand for the video giant seems unstoppable. Netflix no longer takes up just a third of Internet traffic anymore. Now it's edging closer to two-fifths.