Netflix is doing its job to reduce piracy in North America

We’ve previously covered about how bit-torrent downloading rates in the US have been going down, while the number of Netflix subscribers has been slowly rising. Well, it looks like we have more details to corroborate with the theory that Netflix is doing a good job of cutting down piracy.

According to a report released by Sandvine, a company that sells network management and measurement software to large ISPs, Netflix takes up more bandwidth than any other website or service in the whole of North America. And yes, any other service includes P2P file sharing. At peak times, Netflix accounts for 30% of all broadband traffic! Compare to P2P file sharing that only hits a peak of 18.8% this year – a drop from 19.2% in the fall of 2010.

With so many platforms that support the service, and high quality, HD movies being streamed through the service, it’s no surprise that Netflix is so popular. Not to mention its large selection of movies that is constantly being updated. It looks like an affordable and useful service is the key to providing Americans with an alternative to piracy. Perhaps the government should pick up some cues from Netflix if they want to crackdown on illegal downloading.

George Wong
Categories: Home, Web
Tags: broadband, download, Netflix, streaming, us, Video