Procter & Gamble Co. is banning employee access to Netflix and Pandora to save bandwidth at its Cincinnati headquarters. The move comes after the P&G IT department discovered that workers were playing over 50,000 YouTube videos and listening to 4,000 hours of Pandora music daily. What's more, one-fourth of company bandwidth was being taken up by workers' consumption of photos, videos and music.
An internal company memo, which the Cincinnati Enquirer got ahold of, notes that bandwidth spikes tend to take place during major sporting events. "These statistics indicate that access to non-business-critical Internet sites goes far beyond the business need," the memo continued.
P&G's current bandwidth usage would cost the company some $15 million a year; it's unknown how much it will save now that Netflix and Pandora have been banned.
Such costly lessons are natural for brands with a heavy digital presence; however, P&G acknowledged that it can't restrict access to YouTube or Facebook because employees use these sites for communication and marketing purposes.
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