As if Netflix’s rapidly growing Watch Instantly catalog—which now boasts the recent addition of the Miramax library—and its ambitions to be considered in the same company of broadcast cable weren’t evidence enough that it has the whole media world stuffed inside a little red envelope, consider this: Nearly one-third of all bandwidth belongs to Netflix users during primetime hours, making it the largest single source of Internet traffic overall. Broadband company Sandvine came to that conclusion in its recent spring report on worldwide traffic trends, even illustrating its findings in this nifty little chart. Netflix is folded into that massive “Real-Time Entertainment” bar, which includes streaming video and interactive chatting.
While Netflix’s absolute dominance already seemed like a given, considering late last year it was revealed that the service had more subscribers than Comcast, seeing the rise of streaming entertainment spelled out like this could well affect how broadcast cable companies behave—beginning with raising the cost of Internet usage, as some services have already done with their tiered data packages. The Atlantic Wire aggregates some other possible outcomes of the growing rise of Netflix here, ranging from more Hollywood studios embracing licensing their content to stream in order to continue combating P2P sharing (which still doesn’t seem to be going anywhere) to Amazon getting smart and buying Netflix now while it still can. But of course, you’ve probably already skipped down to the comments to ask where “Porn” is hidden on that graph. Is it maybe under “Secure Tunneling”?