DIS - Coronavirus Lockdown: Netflix YouTube and Amazon Prime Are Doing Something Silly and Smart In Europe
Led by Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) YouTube, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Prime, and Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX), video streaming services everywhere are limiting their video quality right now. They are conserving bandwidth in response to the coronavirus pandemic, mainly due to pressure from regulatory bodies. Millions of people around the world find themselves stuck at home with a growing thirst for digital entertainment, so why don't we turn down the video quality for a while?
Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon Prime are doing the right thing here, but maybe not for the reasons you expected.
It started with calls from the European Commission to cut down the bandwidth consumed by video streaming services. Thierry Breton, EU's commissioner for internal market and services, had a chat about this issue with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings earlier this week, suggesting that video streams should default to standard definition rather than high-def in this era of higher network traffic volumes.