With so much information (and misinformation) about what is consuming network bandwidth going around -  I heard it said recently that Streaming Video is taking up 96% of all available bandwidth.  But that's not true based on the chart below and the findings of Ellacoya Networks:

"…according to a recent report (PDF) by Ellacoya Networks and on data of approximately one million broadband subscribers in North America, the study says that — bucking a four year trend — HTTP traffic now surpasses that of p2p, largely due to the proliferation of video streaming sites such as YouTube. Remember that for years it has been p2p traffic that’s dominated broadband usage, as users download pirated music and movies over p2p file-sharing networks."

I don't know about online streaming video, as a totality, but if we're just taking YouTube - 10% of all bandwidth is made up of YouTube Traffic.

I'm not so much into the rest of the YouTube represents 10% of North American Internet traffic post from Last100, but issues of how bandwidth does Online Video take up does interest me since it's related to Social Networking use.  As more and more people use YouTube Videos on their blogs - or view shows on YouTube and other video sharing sites - the amount of that shared streaming video traffic should go up - as a direct relationship to the amount of Social Networking that has increased….at least, that's my theory.

Now, what would have been nicer, is if I could get the last couple of years of history on YouTube bandwidth usage as part of the same study.