Hotel still operating under Aspen Suites name: Summit Hotel Properties says it has rebranded nine of the 11 hotels that lost their flags as a result of a dispute with Choice Hotels International. But the new flag for a 127-room hotel in Baton Rouge, formerly a Cambria Suites, now an Aspen Suites, has yet to be determined. Summit has said it soon expects to put a flag on the hotel, its only affected Louisiana property.
Movie mania: Move over, Web surfing. Netflix movies now take up more of the Internet pipes going into North American homes. A study published today by Sandvine, which makes equipment that helps cable and phone companies manage their Internet delivery systems, shows that Netflix movies and TV shows account for nearly 30% of traffic into homes during peak evening hours, compared with less than 17% for Web browsing. Only about a quarter of homes with broadband subscribe to Netflix, but watching movies and TV shows online takes up a lot of bandwidth compared with Web surfing, e-mail and practically every other Internet activity except file sharing and videoconferencing. As late as last year, both Web surfing and peer-to-peer file sharing—mainly the illegal trading of copyrighted movies—were each larger than Netflix’s traffic. The number of Netflix customers is growing quickly, to 23.6 million subscribers in the U.S. and Canada as of the end of March. The growing use of the streaming service is good news for the company, which is trying to reduce what it spends to mail DVDs.
