14 DAY TRIAL // Netflix continues to rule Internet usage lists in North America, but they’re also gaining on the mobile Web.
According to broadband Internet service tracking firm Sandvine, the dominance of real-time entertainment is due to the continued market leadership of Netflix, The Next Web reports.
Since the company’s streaming service accounts for almost a third of peak downstream traffic on fixed networks, we tend to agree.
During the Internet’s peak, Netflix accounts for 32.3 percent of downstream traffic in North America. On the second place, you can find YouTube, but their share is of 17.11 percent.
While Netflix’s share is quite impressive, it seems to have diminished slightly over the past few years.
However, that’s no reason to worry, Sandvine points out.
“While we observed that their share of traffic decreased by a fraction of a percent since our 2H2012 study, it should not be interpreted as a decline in the popularity of the service at the expense of their competitors. In fact, competing pay-video service such as Amazon (1.31%) and HBO Go (0.34%) saw their relative share decline in a greater amount than that of Netflix,” the company said.
Netflix has also almost doubled its data usage share. It reached 3.98 percent in the last twelve months alone, going up from 2.24%.
According to the tracking service, the share will continue to increase in the months to come, as technology continues to advance.
As smartphones grow in size and mobile Internet connections become faster, watching TV episodes and movies on your gadgets doesn’t seem so far-fetched, especially when you’re on the road.
Netflix could be one of the competitors that take advantage of this, so their share could increase even more. However, in the mobile department, YouTube continues to be the one that leads the list with 24.89 percent.