photo © 2008 Angel Leon | more infoPeople streaming movies from Netflix are eating up a ton of bandwidth, and it's only going to get worse, writes Farhad Manjoo in Slate. He cites a new report: Netflix watching accounts for 20% of web traffic in North American homes during peak usage hours."That's an amazing share," writes Manjoo. "It beats that of YouTube, iTunes, Hulu, and, perhaps most tellingly, the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol BitTorrent, which accounts for a mere 8% of bandwidth during peak hours."
The demand may finally force ISP providers to expand capacity and finally get America's broadband capabilities where they should be. They better: Netflix will soon be flipping its business model. Becoming a streaming company that will also rent discs. "The future of Netflix, then, is the Internet. It's an open question whether the Internet can keep up."
