- Due to ongoing COVID-19 fear, OTT platforms are asked to put down their video quality for the time being.
On Wednesday, a tweet popped up from EU Commissioner for Internal Market, Thierry Breton said he spoke with Reed Hastings – CEO of Netflix about the issue, and asked the company to switch to SD when HD is not necessary.
Netflix report to CNN confirmed that Hasting spoke with the EU commissioner but the company did not indicate whether it would switch to standard-definition streaming video by default.
The request came after the worldwide announcement of social distancing and work from home as much possible. Like other OTT platforms, Netflix uses around 1GB of data every hour for each stream of standard definition video, and up to 3GB per hour for each stream of HD video.
Like other OTT platforms, Netflix uses an adaptive bite rate (ABR) method for streaming video that by default automatically adjusts to deliver the highest possible quality based on a customer’s current internet connection speed and network condition. Users may manually switch back to standard quality if they feel like it.
Over the past few years, OTT Platform Netflix has consistently been one of the biggest consumers of broadband capacity as a % of overall usage.
While people are working from home, schools and colleges are shut down, the usage of internet services witnessed a sudden leap. Just to make sure the internet services don’t get disturbed during this chaos; authorities have asked the OTT platform Netflix to stay low with its video quality as it will lead to less consumption of internet services.
Recently, YouTube surpassed Netflix in terms of internet service usage by as much as twice the volume of internet traffic, according to finding from Sandvine – A company that tracks bandwidth-consumption trends by using data from the global internet service providers (excluding China and India).
Summing Up:
Isn’t it natural? When all the kids and youngsters of the house have stopped going out, the only major entertainment source which is left is the internet. Talking about all the employees working from home, uninterrupted internet service is a must.
Which is a new challenge for all the internet service providers? Adding to this, if OTT platforms like Netflix continue to suck this huge amount of bandwidth sheerly for entertainment purposes, it is not fair enough.
