Will Streaming Movies Clog the Net?

The possibility exists. Concern is rising that as companies such as Netflix offer streaming videos, the Internet will not have the broadband capacity to keep up. Think it will not happen. Just remember the end of last semester. Demand for access to the Web increased. Students were researching papers, running their IM's and Twitter accounts, downloading songs, listening to Internet radio, watching videos, reading emails, playing online video games--all of which is data that must be transmitted. Transmission slowed, frustrating you especially when you needed to download something now. Why did it slow? The transmission cables can handle only so much data. As demand for data increased, the system slowed. Imagine that problem on a national scale, which is precisely what happened recently in Canada.

Slate reported the following:

On Sept. 22, Netflix began offering its streaming movie service in Canada. This was Netflix's first venture outside of the United States, and because the company wasn't offering its traditional DVD-by-mail plan to Canadians, its prospects seemed questionable. How many people would pay $7.99 per month (Canadian) for the chance to watch Superbad whenever they wanted?

A lot, it turns out. According to Sandvine, a network management company that studies Internet traffic patterns, 10 percent of Canadian Internet users visited Netflix.com in the week after the service launched....Netflix videos quickly came to dominate broadband lines across Canada...At peak hours (around 9 p.m.) the service accounted for more than 90 percent of the traffic on one Canadian broadband network.

It's not just Canada. Netflix is swallowing America's bandwidth, too, and it probably won't be long before it comes for the rest of the world. That's one of the headlines from Sandvine's Fall 2010 Global Internet Phenomena Report...According to Sandvine, Netflix accounts for 20 percent of downstream Internet traffic during peak home Internet usage hours in North America.... [Netflix] seems sure to keep growing....

Over time, we've shifted away from "asynchronous" applications toward "real-time" apps. Every year, that is, we're using more of our bandwidth to download stuff we need right now, and less for stuff we need later." Sandvine's 2008 report (PDF) showed that all the applications that saw big increases in traffic were dependent on real-time access...

What does that mean for Internet marketing? Should the Net slow or clog, creating long waits that were common years ago before broadband, people will not use the Web as frequently as they do today, giving them less opportunity to see the ads.