Netflix Is Still the Internet Bandwidth King, but is Losing Ground to Competitors

The world is doing a ton of Netflix and chillin’, but maybe not as much as last year, according to a new report.

The video streaming behemoth was the biggest data hog last year, accounting for 15% of downstream traffic, according to bandwidth management company Sandvine.

Last month, Sandvine released an update to that 2018 report, which lists Netflix as No. 2 with 12.6% of downstream traffic on the internet. The company was edged out slightly by what Sandvine calls HTTP Media Stream, which it defines as a collection of video streaming sites that use a standard video streaming protocol that the company doesn’t track individually.

While the company still boasts the title of the largest single streaming service on the web and the single largest source of downstream traffic, the company has shown signs of a decline as competing streaming services like the soon-to-be launched Disney+, Hulu, HBO Go and Amazon Prime Video threaten to take a bite into the company’s profits.

It’s also losing some of America’s favorite shows, like The Office and Friends, to streaming service competitors NBC and HBO Max, respectively, the latter of which is expected to launch in 2020.

The company’s last quarterly earnings report, released in July, found that only 2.7 million U.S. subscribers were added, which was about half of what the company expected.

Most of the company’s new customers were in international markets where the streaming service market isn’t quite as saturated, according to the report.

Following miscellaneous internet videos and Netflix, Youtube was third with 8.7% of all internet traffic, according to Sandvine.

The network share belonging to video streaming services will skyrocket once 4K and 8K videos become mainstream, which could grow a single video as much as five times larger from an HD video.

“As 4K and 8K enter the market, the expectations will grow even more, and network operators will need to not only sell high speed packages, but also to deliver on QoE expectations during peak hours,” Sandvine said in the report.

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