News YouTube and Netflix begin reducing streaming quality in Europe

Fewer pixels.

 

No, just more compression.

A 4K BD has a 70-100mbit video stream, streaming services have typically been something around 15mbit, so one would assume they've been reduced to 10mbit or thereabouts.

It's all 4K, just more or less compression.

Think of it as a jpeg - you can save it at a bunch of different quality levels, and the resulting image is the same resolution, but the lower the quality, the blockier it appears and the more artifacts are visible.

 

I would love to know what kind of hit on exchanges isps have seen with the heavier, all day, load.

 

Meanwhile in an email from BT today...

 

I mean... when your edge infrastructure leaves the vast majority of the country on a ropey broadband service that's years behind most of the rest of the developed world, it's not hard to have massive over-provisioning centrally.

 

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So from macroblocking nastyness to very slightly macroblockier nastyness. I don't think anyone streaming video is doing so because they want video quality (or they'd be barking up the wrong tree, and possibly in the wrong forest entirely), so Netflix could probably never roll back the change with minimal issue.

 

It'll just look slightly worse, blockier areas of colour, often seen in dark areas of films etc you see blocks of colour rather than smooth transitions between different shades.

 

Working from home does not generate any where near the traffic that downloading games generates (see the new MW game). Obviously full fat 4K might push some residential connections but in the UK our infrastructure for this is very unlikely to become saturated.

 

Basically, JPEG-like compression smears a layer of vaseline on the images to make them smaller, but less sharp. More compression uses more vaseline to make the images even smaller. They're still sending out images that decompress to a full 7680x4320 pixels, but the data used to construct those pixels has less detail in it.

It benefits, mostly, Netflix et al, since they're sending less data out. And since people only pay for resolution, not bit rate, they can turn the compression up as hidh as they want and be legally okay even if it starts looking worse than DVD due to excessive compression.

 

What codec do the popular services use? I know youtube uses both h264 and vp9 but that is all i know!

 

I suppose that working from means more activity alongside that that isn't exactly working.