Call it the 'Netflix effect': Australians' hunger for data skyrocketed in the last year as online video streaming took the nation by storm.

In the three months to December 2015 we chewed through a record 1.7 exabytes of data – or 1.7 million terabytes.

That's 50 per cent more than in the same period in 2014 – a record spike of more than half an exabyte.​ We only passed an exabyte worth of downloads for the first time in a three-month period in 2014, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics data.

If you can't fathom how big that is, consider this: during Telstra's free data day on Sunday, a single customer ploughed through 1TB of data – enough to download 14 seasons of Mythbusters; 24 seasons of The Simpsons; the entire Wikipedia database; Microsoft software packages; Xbox game updates; Spotify playlists and much, much more.