The telecoms regulator’s report shows that Netflix remains the source of the largest Internet traffic in France. One-fifth of all streams are for the SVOD service.
This is one of the lessons of the report on the state of the Internet in France, which the telecommunications regulator has just unveiled this Thursday, June 30. Netflix still remains the online service that generates the most traffic on the French network. The subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service alone is responsible for 20% of streams.
Netflix far outranks its direct pursuers, starting with Google, which is in second place, with traffic of just over 10% (mainly because it owns YouTube). Then follow Akamai, which is a company that provides content caching services on the net, Facebook and Amazon (which also generates a lot of traffic with Prime Video).
Five platforms weigh 51% of traffic
The top 5 is made up of companies that all offer video in their own way. This is true for Netflix and Amazon with their SVOD platform, but also Google with YouTube, Facebook with the many clips that the public shares and Akamai, because it sells caching services to video services — like Disney+, which relies on this provider, among others.
These companies together account for 51% of traffic in France. Moreover, the rest of the ranking is made up of other groups very present in the video: we find Twitch and Canal +. The rest of the ranking also includes companies identical to Akamai, such as Lumen, EdgeCast, CDN77 or Fastly – they too deliver video.
Netflix’s domination of French traffic has already been observed in past years – in 2020 and 2021 in particular. To try to lighten its footprint on the network, Netflix does not intend to give up ultra high definition (4K), which it has been offering since 2014. On the other hand, the platform mobilizes codecs to reduce bandwidth. required for a video.
Netflix relies on the AV1 codec, which can lower the necessary bandwidth by 20% – in short, a video keeps the same visual quality, using less data. Another lever is the “variable bitrate”, which consists of adjusting “ the amount of data needed for a scene-by-scene video so that simple scenes require less data than complex ones. “.