Netflix is throttling its video streams by 25% in Europe for 30 days to reduce its internet 'weight' ... [+]
It seems that I was too late publishing my previous article. For it’s now been announced that Netflix has responded to the request of EU Commissioner Thierry Breton to only stream video in standard definition by cutting its streaming rate by 25%. But only in the EU!
Precise details of exactly how the 25% streaming rate reduction will be applied aren’t yet clear. But the basic statement issued so far by Netflix (as carried by the BBC) goes as follows:
“Following the discussions between Commissioner Thierry Breton and [Netflix CEO] Reed Hastings, and given the extraordinary challenges raised by the coronavirus, Netflix has decided to begin reducing bitrates across all our streams in Europe for 30 days.”
It’s obvious from these words that the decision has been made in direct to response to the request of Breton, who took it upon himself to push for such a move despite seemingly having little understanding of the technicalities of video streaming (he explicitly asked for streams to be reduced to SD rather than HD, seemingly oblivious to the existence of 4K, and the fact that these days HD streams are extremely efficient).
The good news, I guess, is that Netflix hasn’t caved in fully to Breton’s ‘everything in SD’ demands. In fact, although we’ll have to see how it pans out in practice, on paper an overall 25% dial down in Netflix streaming data levels to each subscriber (if that’s how Netflix plays it) would still allow many households to continue getting 4K and HD streams as they do now. They just won’t look quite as good (presumably they’ll appear a little softer, and/or suffer with more visible banding and compression artefacts).
The fact that a 25% drop should in most cases allow users to still enjoy 4K or HD pictures is, of course, pretty important for Netflix, given that it charges subscribers to its 4K service a premium for the extra picture quality. The streamer surely doesn’t want to have to go about issuing refunds to everyone who currently pays for the UHD subscription if they can suddenly only get HD streams.
It’s interesting, too, that Netflix has for now, at least, only taken this step for Europe. You can’t help but think that if it really thought the measure was going to make a major difference to Internet capacity while people remain housebound in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, it would have announced the same measure for the US. But maybe I’m being too cynical. And maybe a similar announcement for the US will come soon.
It remains to be seen if other streaming services such as Disney+ will follow suit; though I suspect the pressure on them to do so could get quite heavy, especially if Mr Breton starts to see this as his cause célèbre.
It also remains to be seen if the 25% Netflix data rate reduction lasts for more than 30 days, given that most experts agree that the impact on Europe of the Coronavirus is going to last much longer than that. Hopefully the need to compete technically with the likes of Disney+ and Amazon Prime will, at least, mean that Netflix doesn’t accidentally forget to ramp its data rates back up when the virus is finally behind us.
At least I can confidently report that the quality of 4K Blu-rays remains entirely unaffected by all these goings on...
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