• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, June 22, 2016

From desktops to portable devices, Netflix and YouTube still account for the vast majority of broadband traffic.

Indeed, Netflix and YouTube now account for 35.2% and 17%, respectively, according to the latest findings from broadband services company Sandvine.

For Netflix, the new numbers are actually slightly disappointing. Its 35.2% share is down from a 37.1% share of traffic, six months ago. Sandvine speculates that the drop is likely the result of improvements by Netflix to better compress their video library.

Even with these improvements in streaming efficiency, Netflix’s traffic share on fixed networks in Latin America increased from 6.6% to 8.3%.

At the same time, Amazon Video is quickly rising in the ranks, Sandvine found. In fact, the relative newcomer is now the third-ranked downstream application -- up from eighth a year ago -- with 4.3% of fixed traffic.

Also of note, Sling TV now appears among the top 20 applications on most U.S. networks, but still accounts for less than 1% of traffic.

More broadly, streaming audio and video now accounts for 71% of evening traffic in North American fixed access networks, and Sandvine expects this figure to reach 80% by 2020.

Cloud Storage -- from Dropbox to iCloud to Google Drive -- has surpassed File sharing as the largest source of upstream traffic during peak period on North American fixed access networks. BitTorrent now accounts for less than 5% of total daily traffic in the region.

The addition of video and voice calling is driving growth in communications apps on mobile networks in both Latin America and North America.

In Latin America, WhatsApp traffic share is now 7.4% -- more than triple what it was two years ago. Facebook and Google account for over 70% of total mobile traffic in the region -- up from 60% reported last year.

Over 60% of mobile traffic in both Latin America and North America is now encrypted, and Sandvine predicts some networks will surpass 80% this year.