Audio Video News

The traditional notion of the family gathering around the TV during “prime time” hours is quaint in the Age of the Internet. The same far-reaching Cisco study that predicts a tripling of Internet traffic over the next few years refers to an “Internet prime time” that occurs between 9 p.m. and midnight across all time zones.

The study found that “busy-hour Internet traffic” is increasing faster than average Internet traffic and predicts that it will grow nearly five-fold by 2020 compared with average traffic, which is expected to grow three-fold over the same period. At the same time, the study predicts that video will account for 80 percent of all Internet traffic by 2020 compared with 60 percent today.

This new prime time for watching video on the Internet is starting to infringe on broadcast TV’s prime-time slot and could eventually supplant it, according to the online news site Quartz.

From the report:

According to Arielle Sumits, a senior analyst at Cisco’s Visual Networking Index team, the second-busiest period for internet traffic was once between 11pm and 1am. It’s now moved to the 7pm to 9pm slot, which has historically been peak TV-viewing time.

Cisco doesn’t have data to explain why the internet’s prime time generally skews later than traditional TV’s prime time, Sumits says. But on-demand video from Netflix and Amazon is undoubtedly substituting for broadcast TV viewing. “We don’t know if broadcast viewing takes place a little earlier, people want to tune in to newsier content, then go to on-demand for entertainment,” she says. “But on-demand is contributing to the fact that busy-hour is getting earlier.”

Details of Cisco’s extensive study can be found here.