YouTube Reduces Default Streaming Quality Globally for 30 Days

Following Netflix's decision to lower the quality of its streams in Europe and Bharat over the past few days, YouTube has at present announced plans to follow suit and reduce the default streaming quality on its own platform. In a statement to Bloomberg on Tuesday, the company said that it volition stream its content in standard definition (SD) by default for the adjacent thirty days to help ease net traffic during the coronavirus outbreak.

The programme seems to have been implemented already, equally the company has started offering SD streams by default on its website every bit well as on its Android app. Practise note that the visitor is non taking away the Hd choice entirely, and users will notwithstanding be able to manually switch to high-definition streaming if they want to. The company'southward solution, withal, differs from that of Netflix, which decided to retain the Hard disk and 4K video resolutions, merely at lower bitrates to reduce bandwidth consumption.

Either way, being the single largest streaming platform in Bharat, YouTube'southward determination will likely help telecom operators in the land reduce network load at a time when bandwidth consumption is at an all-time high worldwide because of increased video streaming and videoconferencing with virtually of the earth staying indoors and working from abode to help prevent the spread of COVID-19.

According to German internet exchange company, DE-CIX, average data traffic at its main network node in Frankfurt recently hit a record nine.1 terabits per second throughput, largely due to a 50 percent increase in video-conferencing traffic and a 25 percent increase in cloud-gaming and social media apply. One can only hope that the reduced video quality on major streaming platforms will help rectify this situation somewhat.