Video and audio streaming from sites such as YouTube and Hulu now accounts for about 27% of the Internet’s global traffic — up from 13% in 2008 — while consumption by peer-to-peer applications has dropped as a percentage of the total, according to a report by network-management systems vendor Sandvine.

Peer-to-peer file sharing represented 20% of all usage on the 2009 survey of 20 Internet service providers worldwide, compared with 32% in 2008. Even though the amount of traffic consumed by P2P applications continues to grow on an absolute basis, video-on-demand applications are growing more quickly, Sandvine CEO Dave Caputo said.

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