Netflix is reducing its traffic on ISPs by 25% in India – TechCrunch

Netflix said on Tuesday that it is lowering its traffic on network providers by 25% in India for a period of 30 days, following a similar move in Europe in a bid to reduce the congestion on internet pipelines.

The American giant said that despite lowering the strain it puts on internet service providers, it will “maintain the quality” of its service. Amazon Prime Video said it has also started to lower the data consumption that streaming takes up on its platform, while local services Disney’s Hotstar, Times Internet’s MX Player and Zee5 say they are working to implement similar measures.

Vijay Venkataramanan, Director of Post-Production at Netflix India, offers clarity on how reducing the traffic would impact the quality of video streams.

“Given the crisis, we’ve developed a way to reduce Netflix’s traffic on telecommunications networks by 25% while also maintaining the quality of our service. So consumers should continue to get the quality that comes with their plan – whether it’s Ultra-High, High or Standard Definition. We believe that this will provide significant relief to congested networks and will be deploying it in India for the next 30 days,” Ken Florance, VP Content Delivery of Netflix, said in a statement.

TechCrunch understands that Netflix, which maintains several different streams for a single title, is removing the highest bandwidth streams as part of this move. This won’t affect most Netflix subscribers in India.

The mobile-only plan that Netflix introduced in India last year is its most popular tier in the country, a person familiar with the matter said. Both mobile-only plan and the basic plan, the immediate advanced tier above it, offer limit streaming in standard definition.

Netflix’s announcement follows a local telecom group’s (Cellular Operators Association of India) appeal to on-demand video streaming services to put less burden on internet pipelines that are facing surge in usage as more people stay and work from home in the wake of coronavirus outbreak.

A report by Bank of America, obtained by TechCrunch, said this week that internet service providers in India were witnessing a 10% surge in the volume of daily traffic and data consumption. The firm analyzed traffic at internet exchanges and spoke with internet service providers to reach that conclusion, it said in the report.