YouTube videos will now play in standard definition (SD) by default in order to cope with the increasing demand of millions of people streaming in their homes, the company announced today. Europe has already started streaming videos in SD last week and it's expected other bandwidth-consuming apps and sites will follow suit.
EU Commissioner Thiery Breton last week made arrangements with Netflix about lowering the quality of streams to SD, which the company quickly undertook. It didn't take long for YouTube to follow suit, and now it's implementing the new policy worldwide for the next 30 days.
While the coronavirus pandemic has impacted the health and wellness of many people around the world, it has also affected countless industries and has forced millions of people to take shelter in their homes, hospitals, and quarantine facilities. With so many people looking for ways to entertain themselves, many have turned to streaming services to kill time, but the backbone of the internet cannot take all that streaming, unfortunately.
"Last week, we temporarily defaulted all videos on YouTube to standard definition in the European Union (EU), United Kingdom (UK), and Switzerland (CH)," YouTube said in a statement. "Given the global nature of this crisis, we are expanding that change globally starting today."
Those who still want to stream in HD can still do so, but they will have to manually set it. YouTube is hoping that by setting the default to SD, it may save a few bit and bytes especially if people don't mind watching videos in lower quality. The changes should roll out gradually starting today.
Disney+, Netflix, and other streaming services have since made their defaults SD. Aside from saving bandwidth, this will also prevent buffering and skipping, which we all know are annoyances when watching videos. On a similar note, game downloads will be also throttled to manage internet congestion.
Content delivery network Akamai explained in a blog post what it is doing to help manage the increased traffic that the internet is currently experiencing. Streaming videos does eat a lot of bandwidth, but what's causing this even more is gaming, a major contributor of huge internet activity.
Akamai, Sony, Microsoft, and other software and gaming companies are now working together to help manage internet congestion, particularly when it comes to downloads, which make up for massive internet traffic especially whenever an update is being rolled out.
Streams and downloads will be controlled for now, and while we all can't adjust our eyes to SD, it's better to watch it that way than not having the opportunity at all.
