The reason for the increase of Video Minute (Bandwidth) usage is always the growth of viewership.
Here are a few possible causes for the growth of your viewership:
1. You only streamed live before and are now also making VOD archives available.
2. You only utilized VOD before and have recently started to stream live.
3.
You recently had a larger event, convention, conference, guest speaker
or guest artist and your live-streams and/or VOD materials were shared a
lot.
4. A video has gone viral and was frequently shared recently.
5.
A video has been re-embedded by a viewer on another website and has
received some traffic. (you can disallow the re-embedding and have the
embed code hidden in your player).
6. You have started to publish
VOD and/or live-streams on new outlets such as Roku, iTunes/AppleTV,
GoogleTV, CROSS.TV or on mobile apps.
7. Certain outlets you
have started to publish to, such as Roku, have enormous power to
build your viewership and your content has become popular on these
platforms.
8. You have uploaded HD content and the percentage of
HD-views has increased. Please remember that 720p views consumes double
the Video Minutes. That said - through Lightcast's advanced
bitrate-adaptive technology only the actual minutes watched in 720p are
accounted for as HD-views which deduct double the minutes.
(Example: a viewer watches 10 minutes of a 20-minute-video. 8 of the 10 minutes the viewer watches in SD, but temporarily - for the duration of 2 minutes - his internet connection makes HD delivery possible (or he manually selects HD). As a result only the minutes watched in HD will accounted for 2:1).
9. You have a Lightcast Social Media and Marketing Package (a "Complete Package") and Lightcast's marketing services are producing results.
10. You were sponsored with free marketing or advertising, such as free advertising on CROSS.TV or free social posts. As a result your website traffic and/or the viewership of your media is growing.