The National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) on Wednesday told Netflix to help free up bandwidth by cutting stream bitrates, or the speed of data transfer, and said the streaming giant complied.
In a statement, telco regulators said data congestion needed to be eased for the duration of the quarantine due to Covid-19. Increased demand risked overloading capacity, the NTC pointed out.
“Data consumption is expected to surge due to the work-from-home arrangements as well as increased, government, private and education demands,” the statement said.
Netflix said on March 21 it began cutting network traffic by 25 percent.
“We immediately developed, tested and deployed a way to reduce Netflix’s traffic on these networks by 25% — starting with Italy and Spain, which were experiencing the biggest impact. Within 48 hours, we’d hit that goal and we’re now deploying this across the rest of Europe and the UK,” Netflix vice president for content delivery Ken Florance said in a statement.
Florance said video resolutions paid for by subscribers would remain the same, depending on the device used.
“Put simply the action we’ve taken maintains the full range of video resolutions. So whether you paid for Ultra-High Definition (UHD), High Definition (HD), or Standard Definition (SD), that is what you should continue to get (depending on the device you are using),” Florance said.
“In normal circumstances, we have many (sometimes dozens) of different streams for a single title within each resolution. In Europe, for the next 30 days, within each category we’ve simply removed the highest bandwidth streams. If you are particularly tuned into video quality you may notice a very slight decrease in quality within each resolution. But you will still get the video quality you paid for.” (PressONE.ph)