As more Indians and users across the globe stay at home, internet traffic is seeing unprecedented surges, leading to a slowdown of services. To combat this, Netflix has now announced a reduction of bandwidth to part of its streams in India. Netflix adds, however, that despite reducing its traffic by 25 per cent on Indian telecom networks, it will maintain the same quality.
Ken Florance, VP of Content Delivery at Netflix said - “Given the crisis, we’ve developed a way to reduce Netflix’s traffic on telecommunications networks by 25 per cent while also maintaining the quality of our service. So consumers should continue to get the quality that comes with their plan – whether it’s Ultra-High, High or Standard Definition. We believe that this will provide significant relief to congested networks and will be deploying it in India for the next 30 days.”
Meanwhile, Director of Post-Production at Netflix India, Vijay Venkataramanan has said on Twitter that since Netflix has really good compression, users in the country will still be able to stream in UHD or 4K.
It is worth mentioning that Netlfix is merely removing the streams with the highest bandwidth from a particular title. Since Netflix has multiple streams for a single title, this move isn’t expected to impact all Netflix users in India.
Also Read: COVID19+ Count In Maharashtra Rises To 119
Additionally, other popular stream providers including TikTok, Google, Facebook, Sony, and Viacom18 have mentioned that their video streams will default to standard definition or 480p while being used on cellular networks across the country. Providers like Hotstar, MX Player, and Zee 5 are reportedly looking to introduce similar measures.
Netflix’s popular mobile-only plan is said to be its most popular subscription package in India, which uses standard definition streaming by default. So these users, as well as those on the Basic plan, will certainly not be affected by the decision to reduce traffic on Indian ISPs.
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