With the influx of people staying home to practice social distancing, Netflix (and other streaming services) needed to make adjustments to their servers to lower the strain of having so many people watching at the same time. In order to do this, Netflix is squeezing back video bit rate to reduce the strain on bandwidth-stressed networks worldwide in Europe and the U.K as a response from the European Union who urged to degrade video quality to conserve internet bandwidth. The cutbacks started in Italy and Spain, where the networks have been hit the hardest. Ken Florance, Netflix’s VP of content delivery, wrote in a blog post:
“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).” To chop bandwidth utilization, Netflix for the next 30 days has “removed the highest-bandwidth streams,” i.e., those with the best quality.” Florance attempted to justify the move by writing, “if you are particularly tuned into video quality you may notice a very slight decrease in quality within each resolution,” Florance wrote. “But you will still get the video quality you paid for.”
Australia and India also saw a reduction in traffic networks by 25%. The move has gain criticism for lowering the quality but still keeping the prices the same. With the public given time to pay bills, and loans, it only makes sense for Netflix to lower costs since a significant amount of people are not going to work. Joining Netflix on the effort is Amazon, Youtube, Disney+, and Apple in response to the EE.UU request. The internet has evolved to not only be considered a luxury but a necessity of life. Without it, we are truly isolated from society, so it is imperative to keep the internet going, and if that means less than 1080p, then that is a fair sacrifice.