Why? Doesn't that seem a little arbitrary? Streaming video just happens to utilize a lot of bandwidth. If the state of things were such that current netflix activity only utilized 5% instead of 50%, people would still be watching the same amount of netflix, but the statistic wouldn't seem as effective for comparison to a dystopia.

Further, netflix watchers are almost entirely composed of former/would-be TV watchers who ultimately end up spending less time in front of the tube because they avoid commercials entirely (adding up to a ton of time in aggregate) as well as at their leisure instead of when the TV guide demands they stop what they're doing to catch their show.

It's partly structural; video content just takes up a lot more bits and bytes. Even if you could somehow find a movie and a novel of equal positive social value, the movie would take up orders of magnitude more network capacity than the novel.

We are in the Brave New World, my friend. That is just the open internet. Now add all those lovely people who watch cable, satellite. ;)

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/americans...

People spend more time watching TV as they do working on average. [34 + 3 = 37]

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm

34.5 hour work week average

More accurately, we live in an eerie mix of Brave New World and 1984 :(

True. ;)

I bet amateur radio operators said the same thing when TV stations took some of their frequencies away.