YouTube and Amazon Prime Video users will see the quality of their content drop as firm’s attempt to help networks cope with millions staying at home during the coronavirus crisis. Both streaming platforms are now joining Netflix who announced yesterday that shows won’t be available in HD until things return to some form of normality.
This radical change is thought to offer a significant saving which would reduce data consumption by around 25 percent – allowing more people to stream at once during these unprecedented times.
To put this into some perspective, an hour of standard definition video uses around 1GB of data whilst HD can use up to 3GB an hour.
Now YouTube and Amazon have both agreed to follow Netflix with users about to getting lower quality streams sent to their devices.
Explaining more about the decision a spokesperson for YouTube said: “We are making a commitment to temporarily switch all traffic in the EU to standard definition by default.
“We are in ongoing conversations with the regulators (including Ofcom), governments and network operators all over Europe.
“We will continue our work to minimise stress on the system, while also delivering a good user experience.”
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And Amazon Video confirmed: “Prime Video is working with local authorities and Internet Service Providers where needed to help mitigate any network congestion, including in Europe where we’ve already begun the effort to reduce streaming bitrates whilst maintaining a quality streaming experience for our customers.”
Despite this news of networks coming under increased pressure, it seems the UK’s broadband firms are confident they can cope.
BT says its networks are built to support “evening peak” network capacity, which generally equates to at least ten times daytime demand.
As a result, the broadband company is confident says it could handle mass-scale home-working in response to COVID-19.
Speaking about the challenges ahead, Marc Allera, CEO of BT’s Consumer division: “Even with a massive increase of people working from home, broadband traffic won’t reach the levels of peak times where millions of people stream HD video at the same time. That’s the kind of traffic we’ve built our networks to support.
“We’re making sure there’s plenty of capacity in the network and that critical services are supported, and our network has more than ten times the amount of capacity needed for normal everyday use.
“Working from home won’t generate significantly more traffic across our network than working in the office, even with more video calling and conferencing. So if more people need to work from home, our network will keep up with demand.”
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