At its peak, Twitch’s traffic quashes Amazon, Hulu, Facebook, and Pandora

More people watch video games on Twitch than people watch television and movies on Hulu and Amazon Instant Video.

Data researched by Deepfield and reported by Wall Street Journal shows that Twitch drove the fourth-most peak Internet traffic last week. This is the latest addition to a constant stream of news about the video game-footage streaming service’s massive growth and influence. Its success is a strong indicator that video games are a powerful mainstream media phenomenon, capable of going head-to-head with the TV and movie industries.

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The company reported in January that 68 percent of its users dialed down their TV watching time in order to use Twitch instead. And Twitch is only behind three Internet traffic giants in the list of peak traffic: Netflix, Google (which owns YouTube), and Apple.

The data was first reported in an article about Apple, but Twitch’s standing in the list deserves attention. Back in January, GamesBeat reported that the service had reached 900,000 broadcasters and that PS4 users rapidly adopted the console’s built-in Twitch broadcasting feature (1-in-5 Twitch broadcasters stream from PS4). Deepfield’s new statistic shows the impact that Twitch has made on the Internet: 1.8 percent of all peak traffic, which surpasses that of Facebook or Tumbler.

“The Twitch phenomenon has been well documented in our ongoing milestone announcements and mirrored by the gaming media, but this latest report adds a new coat of paint to the picture,” said Twitch vice president of marketing Matthew DiPietro. “While we already tend to envision ourselves aligned with the ubiquitous brands that were featured, it’s great that the Wall Street Journal is amplifying our success in a context that its mainstream readership can easily digest.”

Deepfield confirmed to GamesBeat that its data is based on bandwidth. That means any website that deals in large video files has an advantage; however, Twitch still placed above Hulu and Amazon, both of which have major video streaming services.