On Netflix ⇥ businessweek.com

Two fascinating articles regarding Netflix from the past two days. First up, Ashlee Vance for Bloomberg Businessweek:

On a normal weeknight, Netflix accounts for almost a third of all Internet traffic entering North American homes. That’s more than YouTube, Hulu, Amazon.com, HBO Go, iTunes, and BitTorrent combined. Traffic to Netflix usually peaks at around 10 p.m. in each time zone, at which point a chart of Internet consumption looks like a python that swallowed a cow. By midnight Pacific time, streaming volume falls off dramatically.

Meanwhile, Dan Frommer has a comparison of the number of subscribers to Netflix vs. AOL, over the years. I knew Netflix was a big deal, but I didn’t realize just how much of a big fuckin’ deal. It’s a staggering achievement — succeeding at a scale where all the other big players have never reached.