Netflix alone accounts for 20% of internet traffic in France. The American giants share the lion’s share.
Each year, Arcep, which oversees networks and communications in France, publishes a report on the state of the Internet in the territory and in particular on its uses. This is a very complete file in which we find observations on the quality of service offered by operators, interconnections, net neutrality and the role of platforms. The chapter on the routing of data is particularly interesting to note the weight of the American giants on our consumption.
Netflix: number 1 in internet traffic
The figure is clear: five providers account for 51% of internet traffic in France. These are Netflix, Google, Akamai, Facebook and Amazon. Obviously, since we are talking about the amount of data here, it is the video streams that are responsible for the majority of the data transferred. This is why Netflix occupies the first place with its SVOD service. It occupied nearly 20% of Internet traffic to individuals, against only 10% for Google in second place.
Arcep mentions a study by Sandvine on a global scale which indicates that 53% of Internet traffic is for video services, ahead of social networks (12.69%), online games (5.67%) and messaging solutions (5.35%). Three categories that can also incorporate the use of video, especially on services like Zoom or WhatsApp.
We can thus imagine that for the cases of Google and Amazon, we are actually talking about the traffic generated essentially by YouTube for the first, and by Prime Video for the second. Twitch is billed separately from Amazon. In the case of Akamai, it is also an American giant specializing in interconnections. It is used by French groups such as the France 2, TF1 or SNCF sites, but it is above all the service used by Disney for its Disney+ SVOD service.
To consume less data, Netflix and the other players must in particular use increasingly efficient codecs, in particular as the display definition increases with the transition to 4K and HDR. Today, all eyes are on the AV1 codec which is to receive official support in the next chips from Qualcomm.
To follow us, we invite you to download our Android and iOS application. You can read our articles, files, and watch our latest YouTube videos.