Super Bowl XLVI Drove Internet Traffic Down As Much As 20%

With more than 111 million Americans tuning in to Sunday's Super Bowl on TV, overall Internet usage in the U.S. declined as much as 20% on Feb. 5 compared with an average Sunday, even with NBC's debut of the first legal online video feed of the game, according to a study by network-equipment maker Sandvine. NBC's free, live online stream of Super Bowl XLVI accounted for 6.2% of all downstream broadband traffic in the U.S. at 9 p.m. Eastern Sunday -- while Netflix's share dropped precipitously during the game, according to Sandvine, which sells equipment for monitoring and managing bandwidth on fixed and mobile networks.