If there’s one thing about the novel coronavirus outbreak you should know, it’s this: It affects much more than your personal well-being. Nowadays, we rely on various internet apps and websites rather way too much. But one thing we fail to realize is that they are designed to function in normal circumstances, well at least in an ideal scenario, isn’t it? Right now, the world is far from normalcy and ideal scenarios.
Since the ongoing coronavirus outbreak has literally forced us to stay indoors and ensure social distancing, we humans have to rely on the ever-connected digital world to keep ourselves informed and entertained.
As more people come online and use these services at the same time, it only means one thing: OUTAGE.
Honestly, these online services cannot afford to face an outage at the moment since most of the major companies are facing a shortage of employees working from offices since they are allowed to work remotely from home.
As a result, video streaming platforms like Netflix and YouTube have swung into action and decided to reduce online streaming quality.
What’s the purpose of this and what’s the meaning of this, you ask? Well, it’s simple. These companies need to ensure that their services remain unhindered for the next few days or perhaps weeks until the effect of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak is mitigated. As more users come online, these services need to ensure that they are capable of accomodating the additional burden.
The European Union (EU) this week has asked both Netflix and YouTube to reduce their system demands on European web networks. Hence, both the companies are bound to comply with these revised and hopefully temporary policies by limiting the capacity for users to stream in HD, starting this week.
“Streaming video can account for 60% or more of traffic on fixed and mobile networks, and the planned March 24 launch of Disney+ in Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, and Switzerland could create a new pain point,” Reuters reports.
YouTube will switch all traffic in the EU to standard definition by default until further notice.