Streaming video traffic increase from Level3?

Thu Dec 6 19:08:50 UTC 2012

We think we found out the source of usage -- the local college's Men's
Volleyball team played last night against the neighboring (rival) school.
The local college's streams are fixed at 1.5 Mbps, so you just need a few
people watching to make it add up in hurry.  That would explain the usage
and why we saw the traffic as streaming video.

Sorry for the noise,

Frank

-----Original Message-----
From: Frank Bulk [mailto:frnkblk at iname.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2012 11:01 PM
To: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Streaming video traffic increase from Level3?

This evening I saw a quadruple increase in traffic volume from Level3
address space, a one-third increase in peak streaming video usage overall,
and when I did a few checks with our netflow tool, it looks like customers
that were streaming Netflix content just days before are now getting it out
of Level3 space rather than our local cache or our upstream provider's
Netflix cache. We also exceeded our previous peak usage by 12%.

Did something change with Netflix that would have resulted in greater usage?
Did Netflix defaults change so that customers are now using HD, or a
higher-rate bitrate HD?

Frank