COVID-19 – Facebook and Instagram Reduce Video Quality

Facebook and Instagram have today become the latest internet content provider to “temporarily reduce” the quality (lower bitrates) of their video streams in order to help UK and EU broadband ISPs cope with demand during the Coronavirus outbreak. Netflix, YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon and Disney+ have already made such a move.

“We are committed to working with our partners to manage any bandwidth constraints during this period of heavy demand, while also ensuring people are able to remain connected using Facebook apps and services during the #COVID-19 pandemic,” said Facebook’s Alexandru Voica.

We should add that the BBC has also made a related adjustment for their iPlayer service, albeit by stopping trials of their 4K (UltraHD) video streams as a “precautionary measure.” The broadcaster added that they will “automatically reduce the data used if networks are congested,” but we’re not clear on how this differs from their normal dynamic quality adjustment for those on slower connection speeds (all video streaming networks do this).

As we’ve said several times before, broadband ISPs in the United Kingdom appear to be managing their capacity quite well and the rising levels of data traffic from residential connections hasn’t caused any real issues (covered here). Indeed ISPs are able to cope with way above normal levels and many of them also cache video content much closer to their end-users (helps to significantly ease the burden on their networks and external links).