Nearly two months ago Netflix said it would reduce video bit rates for 30 days in Europe in an effort to reduce bandwidth consumption by customers by 25% during the COVID-19 crisis.
Netflix’s throttling came at the urging of European Union Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton who was worried that ISPs in the EU would suffer overwhelming strain with millions quarantined at home.
Despite those fears, European internet networks have handled the increase in traffic fine with no major congestion according to the EU’s telecom regulator. In fact there’s been very little talk of internet outages beyond a few localised incidents.
We’re now 55 days past the announcement with life slowly returning to normal, but Netflix customers in Europe and the U.K. are starting to get irate as the company is reportedly still delivering throttled HD and Ultra HD video with bit rates under 50% of what they were – leading to a noticeable degradation of image quality.
Here’s where it gets tricky as Netflix charges different rates depending on video quality – the higher the resolution the more you pay. Technically they are fulfilling that, still offering SD, HD and 4K streams for example, but in order to do so they are bit-rate throttling the quality of the highest streams.
Prior to the lockdown, Netflix’s recommended bandwidth minimums were 5 Mbps for HD video and 25 Mbps for Ultra HD. But a user in the Netherlands this week said they were seeing bit rates maxing out at 1.5 Mbps for HD and 7.5Mbps for 4K.
One customer in the U.K. last week found a “Disenchanted” episode streaming at just 0.47 Mbps, a Spanish customer posted a photo showing a bit rate of just 0.51 Mbps on an HD stream and added: “What’s the point of having 1080p resolution with this ridiculous bitrate? The quality is really bad.”
A company rep said in a statement to Variety: “As network conditions improve we will begin lifting the bit-rate caps we introduced in March on a country-by-country basis. In the last two months we’ve added more than four times the normal capacity to deal with the increased demand and help maintain the quality of our service for members.”
There’s good news though as they appear to have been listening to these complaints as 4KFilme reports that, in Germany at least, the company has begun working with ISPs to roll back throttling.
