Netflix’s Bandwidth Approaching Internet Total

So I joined Netflix, one of the first of the DVD rental mailer companies, a long time ago and like it a lot. I was interested, then, to read a rough calculation that, in terms of 190,000 MPEG-2 format DVDs, Netflix’s daily bandwidth totals 1.5 TB. This is a sizable fraction of the current total estimated Internet daily bandwidth: somewhere between 2-4 TB. Of course, Peter Wayner’s calculations do not allow for the online delivery of movies in more compression-efficient formats, such as the MPEG-4-derived DIVX, where a typical 4-7 GB DVD can be reduced to around 700 MB with minimal quality loss.

I guess the CD manufacturers also thought they were safe, when a typical CD occupied 700MB of data in an era of mainly dialup connections. Then along came MP3 with its one-tenth compression ratio and so much for that idea.

And I found out from some surfing that some Netflix competitors, such as CafeDVD, QwikFlicks, and DVD Avenue, are cheaper and offer porn, something Netflix avoids.