It’s finally happening - people are starting to watch movies online.  I know, I know…everyone has been streaming and downloading video for at least a few years now, right?  There’s video all over the net.  Every third blog post has an embedded video.  There’s YouTube, Vimeo, and video podcasts.  There’s PlayStation Network, Xbox LIVE Marketplace, and Amazon VOD.  Folks are streaming to their TiVos and everyone has Rokus and Windows Media Center Home Theater PCs and Apple TVs.  Forget timeshifting cable with your DVR…everyone gets their TV via hulu or Boxee anyway.  Who needs Blockbuster when your new coffeemaker does Netflix Streaming?  iTunes!  …or, for the more frugal, Bi*Torrent!  Clearly, everybody’s been downloading and streaming movies and TV more or less constantly for some time now, right?

Nope.  The number of conduits for movies and TV over the Internet may have proliferated greatly in the last year or two, and streaming may be as familiar as cable to the geekier among us, but most normal humans haven’t been getting their new releases or favorite shows via their Internet connections.  I know, because I see how much data they download.  And I talk with other network operators who see how much data their users download.  And we compile aggregate stats on things like bandwidth usage patterns over the course of the day, protocol breakdowns showing streaming traffic rates at any given time, target analyses to determine how much traffic we’re pulling from Amazon’s servers or Apple’s Akamai nodes, etc.  There just hasn’t been that much movie and TV traffic.  …that is, until recently.

Streaming TV and especially streaming/downloading movies seems to have gone mainstream.  Over the past 6 months, we’ve seen a steady increase in streaming traffic of all sorts, but particularly in our upstream ingress traffic between 6 and 9pm, which has tripled.  That time period now represents the largest daily bandwidth peak we experience, and unlike most other traffic peaks in our upstream usage, this “streaming movie” peak is exacerbated on the weekends (a relatively sure sign of what’s going on).  Other ISPs are seeing similar trends.

The vast majority of our connectivity customers have 1.5Mbps or higher speed DSL connections.  More than a third have 3Mbps or better.  1.5Mbps is acceptable for real-time streaming of a standard definition movie.  3Mbps is about the minimum for streaming a 720p HD movie.  I fully expect to see more and more movie streaming and downloading from our users, particularly during and around the traditional prime-time period in the evenings.  As streaming video becomes increasingly popular, large ISPs will likely respond more and more with bandwidth caps and/or outright metered usage.  Indra’s Net has no plans to move in that direction, though we will be purchasing additional upstream capacity to satisfy this new demand for bandwidth.  It will certainly be interesting to see how this new model for entertainment distribution plays out over the coming months and years, and I will provide additional details about the movie and TV traffic we’re seeing (always anonymized in aggregate data, per our privacy policy) in a future post.