US BitTorrent traffic well down, but booming everywhere else

Despite the Movie industry’s claim that you cannot compete with free, the growth of legal TV/movie on demand services such as Netflix appears to be killing off BitTorrent’s Internet share in the US, with BitTorrent traffic now just 11.3% during peak hours compared to 17.3% last year. While this doesn’t take Internet traffic growth into account, it appears that there is little to no growth in actual BitTorrent traffic. Even overall P2P file sharing traffic is at an all-time-low of just 12.7% in the US. For comparison, Netflix alone accounts for 32.9% of all US downstream traffic during peak hours.

In other parts of the world, including Europe and Asia, where there are fewer legal alternatives, BitTorrent traffic continues to grow, with BitTorrent accounting for 20.32% of all peak hour Internet traffic in Europe and eDonkey adding another 9.39% on top of this. In fact, P2P traffic has nearly quadrupled over the past 18 months without taking absolute traffic into account. In the Asia-Pacific, BitTorrent now accounts for 27% of overall Internet traffic.

According to Sandvine who publishes these statistics, the lack of legal alternatives is one of the reasons for such high P2P traffic volumes outside the US. Geographical licensing restrictions and airing delays also encourage people to pirate on BitTorrent.

Based on the US traffic findings, it is quite clear that the best way to compete with free P2P involves removing artificial barriers such as eliminating the release delays for TV shows and movies. Even trying fighting piracy by applying DRM and shutting down file sharing websites seems to do little other than create an incentive to pirate with the publicity.

Further info and statistics can be found in this TorrentFreak article.