Netflix Reduces Data Consumption By 20 Percent by Re-encoding their entire Library

Netflix Reduces Data Consumption By 20 Percent by Re-encoding their entire Library

 

Netflix Reduces their Data Consumption By 20 Percent by Re-encoding their entire Library of videos, both saving themselves and their users data, allowing higher quality streams to be possible on weaker internet connections. 

This change has been made as a result of internal tests by Netflix, which challenged their employees to compare their new lower data streams to their normal streams, asking if they could tell the difference. In this internal test any Employee that could tell the difference and tell them what was different would win a bottle of wine, but after a long time looking at both video feeds no employee was able to tell the difference. After the internal testing Netflix gave their new bandwidth saving streams the go-ahead, saving the consumer data, them bandwidth while maintaining the same visual quality.  

    

Right now Netflix and other video stream make up an ever larger and continually growing percentage of the internet, making the ability to stream content with a high level of quality and a low bitrate a highly sought after technology.

Netflix has been continually evolving how they handle bandwidth, continually improving their efficiency and reducing the amount of bandwidth that consumer and Netflix themselves require for a high quality stream. 

With ISPs and Netflix being continually at at each others throats Netflix need to do whatever they can in order to allow their consumers to enjoy their content with as little bandwidth as possible, especially in the US where ISPs constantly threaten Netflix with data caps. 

With 4K Streams likely becoming more common in the future it is great to see Netflix taking their data use seriously, but a lot of work will need to be done on the end of the ISPs in order for users to get a perfect experience, after all efficiency can only go so far. 

 

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