Perhaps just as surprising, Jarvis said, the top streaming-media cities are not even among the towns with the highest rate of broadband Internet adoption. Instead, he said, the bulk of Net users in the busiest streaming cities use dial-up connections. As a consequence, it is not feature-length films or pornography that rank as the most popular online media in those cities, Jarvis said. It is Internet radio. So what appears to be happening, Jarvis said, is that people in Miami, Cincinnati and the other bug stream-using cities are tapping into the Internet to hear music, talk shows and news radio emerging from other markets.
Internet radio is probably one of the most popular forms of streaming media.
So I think that people take advantage of the fact that they can go beyond their local market when they go on the Web. Though its popularity is undisputed, pornography is not a particularly important piece of the streaming-media picture painted by the survey, Jarvis said, because it relies mostly on video. And video requires broadband connectivity.