The 2022 report on the state of the Internet in France by Arcep highlights the impressive share of large technology companies in French Internet traffic, Netflix in the lead.
We learn in particular that the majority of internet traffic in France is occupied by companies broadcasting video content. On the first step of the podium, we find Netflix which occupies almost 20% of the total traffic in France, far ahead of number two which is none other than Google with 11% of the traffic, a large part of which comes from YouTube.
51% of traffic in France comes from 5 content providers
To finish this top 5, we find on the third step the company Akamai with approximately 8% of the traffic, then Facebook with 7% and Amazon with 6%. Lumen, Twitch and Canal+ follow. If you are surprised not to find Disney+ in this ranking, it is because the company uses the services of content delivery network (CDN) service providers such as Akamai, Lumen or even CDN77.
France is far from being the only country where the majority of data in transit is occupied by video streams. Indeed, a study by Sandvine makes a similar observation on a global scale where 53.72% of Internet traffic passing through electronic communication networks comes from video traffic. This is without counting on the other categories of the ranking in which video content is also present such as social networks (12.69% of traffic), online games (5.67%) and messaging services such as Zoom, WhatsApp, Messenger or Microsoft Teams (5.35%).
How to limit the share of Internet traffic from video streams?
The growing weight of video streams is explained not only by the growing popularity of streaming platforms, but also by the increase in the quality of the content broadcast. With the increase in displayed definition (4K), as well as the use of technologies such as HDR, watching video content requires more and more bandwidth.
To overcome this “problem”, reduce the size of the content without degrading the quality and optimize the routing of the videos, the codecs have an important role to play, as underlined by the Electronic Communications Regulatory Authority:
“Encoding with several levels of quality as well as the choice of the quality distributed to the end user, in particular its optimization according to the terminal, are also challenges in the context of reducing the environmental footprint of digital technology. »
Source :
ARCEP