new and digital media stories 17/11/13

Sun Online finds it hard to hit the net

The first figures since the paper put up its paywall show a heavy 30% drop in audience, despite the promise of goals on demand

The Sun newspaper have lost 30% of their audience since the paper put up its paywall. It seems that their subscribers haven't "swallowed the bait" when it comes to the Sun allowing subsribers to watch the Premier league goals on demand with any device that they have. 

In August; as goals for subscriptions just started up; the Sun Online had a digital total of...

•  6,244,489 (with 2,389,764 arriving by smartphone or pad alone.)
• In September, now featuring football wall-to-wall, that was down 32.9% (4,188,720)
• mobile plus pad visits dropping off sharply to 1,012,450. 
• Only PC users subscriptions at a steady figure

The Suns pay wall has affected how people get their news now as they were not use to paying for the Sun and therefore when the paywall took place they were bound to loose subscriptions despite adding the option to watch all Premier league goals on demand with any device. Also, not all of the Suns subscribers like to watch football therefore this additional thing which they've added does not appeal to all their readers. 

BitTorrent says Netflix is hogging bandwidth - not 'beating' it

Head of marketing at peer-to-peer giant argues his company is good citizen of internet, while streaming company chokes ISPs

Research suggesting that Netflix is responsible for a third of US peak time download traffic is nothing to be proud of, argues BitTorrent, the company best known for creating a peer-to-peer download protocol widely used to share music and movies. The report, produced by Sandvine, shows Netflix to be responsible for almost a third of all US downstream traffic at peak times, with YouTube contributing another 18%. Compared to the streaming video services, BitTorrent's portion of traffic is minuscule, at just over 4%. The bittorrent protocol has a much larger share of upstream traffic, due to its peer-to-peer nature. Almost every file downloaded using bittorrent is downloaded from another user's computer, rather than from a central server. Even so, in the aggregated upload and download data, Netflix remains the biggest user of traffic by a large margin.

"Netflix is hogging all of the bandwidth in North America," BitTorrent's vice president of marketing"
"This is a problem for Netflix. They're talking about [the super-high-definition TV format] 4K, but they're crushing the network already; if they deliver 4K they're going to completely grind it to a halt. All the ISPs are pissed at Netflix, because this is an unsustainable situation."