Netflix is doing it’s part to ensure that the internet stays intact during the coronavirus pandemic by reducing streaming quality in Europe for at least the next month to prevent the internet collapsing under the strain of unprecedented usage due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The announcement comes after appeals from EU officials for Netflix as well as individual users to ditch high definition video to prevent the internet from collapsing as a result of the heightened traffic due to everyone staying inside. European Commissioner Thierry Breton, who is responsible for the EU internal market covering more than 450 million people, spoke to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on Wednesday and again on Thursday about the strain video streaming was placing on networks.
“We estimate that this will reduce Netflix traffic on European networks by around 25% while also ensuring a good quality service for our members,” a Netflix spokesperson said in a statement.
Luckily, despite the sharp increase in internet usage, no outages have been reported so far. EU officials also said that they would be working closely with the regulator that oversees electronic communications in the bloc to set up a special reporting mechanism to monitor internet traffic and quickly respond to capacity issues.
“At this stage, new traffic patterns are being effectively handled by engineers as per standard network operations,” Lise Fuhr, director-general of the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association, said in a statement. “We support the European Commission’s effort to ensure that national governments and national regulators have all the tools they need to keep networks strong across the continent.”
In a statement, Breton explained that streaming platforms, telecom operators, and users “all have a joint responsibility to take steps to ensure the smooth functioning of the internet during the battle against the virus propagation.” He added, “I welcome the very prompt action that Netflix has taken to preserve the smooth functioning of the Internet during the Covid-19 crisis while maintaining a good experience for users.”
The reduction could mean that some users “see a reduction in perceptible video quality,” while others won’t see any change, a Netflix spokesperson revealed to CNN Business.
