Posted by Dan Deeth in 
Be sure to keep in mind that the chart above has two axes that shows traffic share (green line), as well as absolute traffic levels (blue line). This is important to note because despite that second peak on Sunday showing a roughly 3% lower traffic share, Olympic streaming traffic by volume was actually 16% higher at 3pm due to there being more users on the network than earlier in the day.
Switching focus to devices used by subscribers to stream, it is interesting, although perhaps not surprising to note that PCs are the most popular device used by subscribers. However, that lead is a small one, and on Saturday we even briefly saw tablet usage overtake PC usage. When tallying all bytes streamed over this past weekend, tablets and smartphones roaming on home networks accounted for over 44% of all video traffic.
One final thing I thought I’d take a look is the impact that the Olympics are having on Netflix traffic because of recent comments from Netflix where they warned that “the Olympics are likely to have a negative impact on Netflix viewing and sign-ups”.
The chart below compares Netflix traffic levels from this past weekend, with the average traffic levels of the previous three weekends in July. Contrary to their own prediction, we actually saw Netflix traffic levels increase slightly over that of previous weeks. While it is too early to tell what impact the full two week event will have on their traffic levels (the first weekend has few marquee events), we would not be surprised to see the Olympics have little to no impact on Netflix and for their traffic to continue to slowly grow organically, even if it might not be growing as fast as other Real-Time Entertainment applications.
Over the next two weeks, I’ll continue to comb through data from around the world and hope to bring some more interesting insight. If you have anything particular you would like us to try and examine, please leave us a comment and I will do my best to look into it.
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[...] spokesman pointed out to us, another broadband technology vendor, Ontario, Canada-based Sandvine, put out a report earlier in the week noting that Netflix usage was not impacted by Olympics [...]
[...] Contrary to recent reports, streaming activity for video rental service Netflix may not have dropped due to the 2012 London Olympics. In fact, the service may even have experienced a slight boost, according to new information provided by Sandvine. [...]