Says Ken Florance, director of content delivery at Netflix:
We find ourselves in the unique position of having insight into the performance of hundreds of millions of long duration, high-definition video streams delivered over the Internet.
As we use a number of CDNs, and our clients can adapt to changing network conditions by selecting the network path that's currently giving them the best throughput, Netflix streaming performance ends up being an interesting way to measure sustained throughput available from a given ISP over time, and therefore the quality of Netflix streaming that ISP is providing to our subscribers. Obviously, this can vary by network technology (e.g. DSL, Cable), region, etc., but it's a great high-level view of Netflix performance across a large number of individual streaming sessions.
Netflix has posted the top 16 ISPs in the nation, and says the chart will be updated monthly.
The company also posted a chart for Canada, which only has 4 ISPs, and Rogers is at the top while Telus is at the bottom.