There May Be a Cut in Streaming Quality on Social Media Platforms Due to Spike in Usage
Internet traffic is way up than its usual limit. Social media platforms are using every means to adapt to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.
Social media giants like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter are quickly making adjustments to keep their platform stable and to maintain proper functioning. This massive surge in traffic has made people come time and again to these platforms for breaks.
Most social media platforms are reducing video bitrates or defaulting to lower qualities to make way for the influx. The major push to downgrade streaming quality has been witnessed in Europe, but the USA and India are not very far behind.
Since India has recently gone on complete lockdown for a minimum of 21 days starting from the 25th of March and is supposed to continue till the 15th of April, the content consumption is only going to increase with each passing day.
Facebook recently announced that it would be temporarily downgrading the video streaming quality by setting the default on low. And the same is applicable to Instagram. The move came in to alleviate any potential network congestion.
YouTube also followed the suite and announced that the streaming quality of the videos would be set low by default on all of its videos. However, there will be an option to manually change the setting. The video sharing platform urged users to change video quality sensibly. Regulators have been asked to bandwidth the usage.