COVID-19: Netflix Lowers Video Quality To Save The Internet From Crashing

What would you do if you were trapped inside your house amid the COVID-19 outbreak? Streaming Netflix, of course. But because of that, everyone is worried that the Internet might crash.

Earlier this week, Thiery Breton, the internal market commissioner of the EU, posted on Twitter saying that he had discussed with Netflix’s CEO, Reed Hastings about this problem. Specifically, Breton has suggested Netflix lower its streaming quality from SH to HD.

On its website, Netflix writes that each of its SD content consumes 1GB of data every hour. Meanwhile, an HD content needs 3GB of data per hour. Breton fears that if everyone went on Netflix to stream, the Internet would crash. Moreover, besides for entertaining purposes, other people would need to use the Internet for remote work.

And it seems like Netflix will make some changes to fulfill the suggestions of the EU, preventing the Internet from being overloaded. In its recent announcement, the company admitted that it would temporarily reduce the bit rate of the videos on its platform in Europe for the next 30 days.

Netflix claimed that this move would cut down the Internet traffic used by European users by up to 25%. It is unclear how this change will affect the quality of Netflix videos for users on this continent.

This decision of Netflix is to deal with the Internet infrastructure problem in Europe amid the COVID-19 outbreak. But since American users are also warned to stay at home, this situation is likely to happen again. According to data from research firm Sandvine, the streaming service now accounts for more than 12% of global download traffic.

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