Netflix, other streamers reduce video quality to deal with demand surge

Millions of people are currently shut up in their homes, riding out the spread of the Coronavirus as it covers the earth. What are we all to do? Well, a lot of people are catching up on their streaming backlogs, tuning in to Netflix and Disney+ and the like.

And that’s good, but it also means that those services are getting a lot more traffic than usual, which is putting a strain on ISPs. To make sure the internet still works for everyone in this time of crisis, the European Union has requested that streamers degrade video quality to conserve internet bandwidth. And that’s just what Netflix is doing in the region, reducing its video quality by 25%, according to Variety.

Somewhat confusingly, Netflix is still promising to maintain resolutions for subscribers who have paid for High Definition (HD) and Ultra-High Definition (UHD) streaming, in addition to Standard Definition (SD), while removing the highest-bandwidth streams…but picture quality will be lowered across the board, so is it worth it to have a 3840 x 2160 when everything is blurry anyway?

Ken Florance, Netflix’s VP of content delivery, seems to think so. “If you are particularly tuned into video quality you may notice a very slight decrease in quality within each resolution,” he wrote in a blog post. “But you will still get the video quality you paid for.” Others are less convinced:

And Netflix isn’t the only streamer cutting back.  YouTube, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+ and Disney+ are all working to comply with the EU request, with Disney+ also targeting a 25% reduction in video quality. Disney’s streaming service is set to drop in the U.K., Ireland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, and Switzerland on March 24, although it won’t be out in France until April 7 following a request from the country’s government. This is a hell of a time to debut a big product like this, eh?

As of right now, streamers don’t seem to be reducing video quality in the U.S., but you figure it’s only a matter of time — people are staying home here, too, after all. According to Florence, partners in Latin America want Netflix to reduce bandwidth as soon as possible, while other providers want to go ahead with business as usual.

So that’s the problem facing Netflix and company in the short term. In the long term, they eventually have to start worrying about what happens to their schedule when production on all of their shows are halted out of well-founded fears of the spread of the virus. “It’s been a massive disruption,” Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos said on CNN’s Reliable Sources. “Every of one of our productions around the world are shut down. It’s unprecedented in history.”

"What’s happening now is we work pretty far ahead with delivering all the episodes of our shows at once, so [there is] no disruption over the next few months. Maybe later in the year as physical production is not operational."

Let’s all stream while we can.

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h/t SyFy Wire, Deadline