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Comment by jasonmcalacanis | Hacker News Reader

If find it hard to believe that the free YouTube, which gets 500M uniques a month--over 100k in the US alone--gets less traffic than Netflix with 23m members.

US traffic stats http://www.quantcast.com/youtube.com http://www.quantcast.com/netflix.com 11m (obviously doesn't count xbox and apps, etc)

Really minutes spent is the most important factor to look at. with 5x the uniques, and being free, I wonder how total minutes spent with netflix content compares to youtube's.

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Usages are completely different. People look at a few YouTube videos in a given day, usually at low quality for a few minutes. Some people, like me and many people I know, have completely replaced cable and network tv with Netflix. Streaming an episode of Lost at 720p is going to take up a lot of bandwidth.

Agreed, it's bandwidth and the duration. In our household, we watch many 20-40 minute shows in a day. Probably a total of 2-10 hours depending on the day. We also watch lots of youtube videos, but it's 1-5 minute videos which amount to a total of 30 minutes or an hour a day.

Most people watch a few minutes of low-res YouTube videos a day maybe, versus 2 hours per movie of HD + 5.1 Surround at night on netflix. Netflix HD is ~2 GB/hour. So I can easily see Netflix driving more BW than youtube.

We don't even need to make the comparison so bold. the world could consume twice(I do not have statistics) as many hours of youtube as it does netflix, but still netflix would demand higher bandwidth...

Netflix HD is 2gb/hour...what is the bandwidth taken by youtube?

yesterday, i watched one youtube video, 30 seconds long.

yesterday, i watched three netflix videos, 45 min long each, totaling 2:15.

i only count as 1 unique for each, but i used netflix 430x longer than i used youtube (not even considering bandwidth differences -- netflix was higher quality). just because there are more uniques doesn't mean that they're spending the same amount of time on the videos.

It's similar to how something like Pandora can use massive amounts of bandwidth despite just being streaming audio, because people listen to it for 8 hours per day, 25 days per month.

That's exactly what I was thinking. This doesn't add up, netflix can make that much traffic, given that only 7m of their subscribers actually use online viewing. This very suspicious IMHO, netflix doesn't even appear in april's comscore report.

You're not taking into account quality of picture. I use about 150gb a month from netflix (it has replaced my cable).

Maybe YouTube is just compressing stuff at a much lower bitrate than Netflix.

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