Video Accounts For 51% Of Total U.S. Internet Traffic, Here's A Breakdown

Yesterday in NYC, Limelight Networks held their first financial analyst day showcasing some new products and more importantly, shared with the industry some of the trends they are seeing in the market. While I was not able to attend in-person, I was able to watch the live webcast, which has now been archived on their website along with the slides from their presentations.

Many of the slides contain some good details on market trends, the growth rate of certain verticals as well as details of video consumption on mobile devices. One of the slides I liked is the one below that shows a breakdown on the type of traffic on the Internet and the total percentage of volume it accounts for.

Limelight's presentation also includes details on the mobile video market including a breakdown on the install base of different platforms as well as market sizing and other data. Some of the numbers displayed aren't new to the industry, but Limelight did a good job of pulling together data from a lot of different sources and analysts all into one place.

Comments

[Rob]

What constitutes 51%? Minutes? Bits used? Users?

[Dan Rayburn]

The metric is bits. They talked about this with the slide, but you are right, would probably help for them to put that on the slide somewhere.

[Rob]

Given the drop in the price of bandwidth, over the last 18 months in particular, I'm not sure bits is a very meaningful way to quantify value or even traffic anymore. It is very inexpensive to stream right now and therefore it is inexpensive to increase bit rates driving up the percentage of "use" as LL describes it. I'm not sure it proves that video use, as measured by unique users, and/or in relation to other content comsumption, and/or in relation to the amount of other content, is actually signfiicantly increasing.

[Jon Dahl]

Rob: I don't think this graph or post is trying to quantify the value of traffic, or even the number of users watching video, just the volume of traffic. And bits is a pretty good measurement of traffic volume.

[Storm]

Belated thanks, and a clarifying question: How is peer to peer defined on this chart? It seems like there could be some overlap with the other categories.