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YouTube is following Netflix by reducing streaming quality due to coronavirus:
YouTube is following Netflix's lead in cutting the quality of its video streaming from high definition to standard in the European Union, it confirmed to CNET, as the bloc's leaders try to reduce strain on the internet during the coronavirus outbreak. Since more people are working from home and children are staying out of school, internet usage has spiked.
"We are in ongoing conversations with the regulators, governments and network operators all over Europe, and are making a commitment to temporarily default all traffic in the UK and the EU to standard definition," the Google-owned video streaming service said in a statement.
The service said it had seen "only a few usage peaks," but is reducing the default quality in the EU for 30 days. Video quality can still be manually adjusted.
European Commissioner Thierry Breton called on streaming services to switch to standard definition "when HD is not necessary" on Thursday. YouTube decided to reduce its default streaming quality after Breton spoke to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and YouTube boss Susan Wojcicki, as previously reported by Reuters.
(Score: 2) by nishi.b on Saturday March 21 2020, @11:13AM
Some websites that were a little overwhelmed by the traffic.
Our elementary school website that was used about twice a year by parents, is now used everyday by everyone to get the work to do for all children stuck at home was slow in the first two days but is back to normal now. Same for other official websites, but apart from that I did not notice any change. I pay 37€ per month for a 1Gb/s fiber connection.
Someone posted on this site the traffic on main echange points, it was a little more than before but far from being saturated, so I am not sure why they did that. Anyway, it is useless to stream 4k video to phones and that may be the only part of the network that is near saturation : the mobile networks, as people are using video calls more often and overall using more their connection which is obviously limited by antenna saturation.