YouTube Goes SD Streaming by Default in Europe Due To COVID-19 (techcrunch.com) 52
YouTube has switched to standard definition streaming by default in Europe. From a report: We asked the company if it planned to do this yesterday, and today a spokeswoman confirmed the step. It's a temporary measure in response to calls by the European Commission for streaming platforms to help ease demand on Internet infrastructure during the coronavirus crisis. Users can still manually adjust video quality but defaults remain a powerful tool to influence overall outcomes.
Ah, the EU... (Score:1)
Re:Ah, the EU... (Score:5, Insightful)
Fast and cheap last-mile Internet! Backbone's as brittle as glass, though...
My guess is Netflix and YouTube are like "Hey, good PR and reduced bandwidth bill? Where do I sign up?" because the net was holding up just fine. Honestly, if I wasn't reading the news I'd have no idea there was any extra traffic.
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When politicians are faced with real problems that they can't solve, they tend to make up fake problems that they can solve, so that it looks like they are "doing something".
They can't fix Covid, but they can fix The Great Internet Meltdown of 2020.
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To be fair, the net wasn't really holding up, most noticeable with gaming and very increased ping c.q. lag times with spikes well over a second or more. Surfing etc the same. It didn't break but there was a noticeable slowdown.
Now, personally i don't blame netflix or youtube, i actually think that's very little bandwidth compared to the rest. Half Europe's working population is suddenly at home, either working at home or not working. They will play games, watch TV and youtube, watch movies or download torre
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To be fair, the net wasn't really holding up, most noticeable with gaming and very increased ping c.q. lag times with spikes well over a second or more.
Blame your shitty ISP. None of the people I talked to have any Internet problem here in EU.
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"...because the net was holding up just fine."
How do you know this?
"Honestly, if I wasn't reading the news I'd have no idea there was any extra traffic."
How would you know?
"Honestly", why is this moderated Insightful? It is not even remotely insightful.
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This is how I know, because the owner of the UK's backbone has said so:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/tec... [bbc.co.uk]
BT has said that even with all this extra homeworking they're still not even at half of the peak load they've had to handle in the past, and they handled that absolutely fine.
There's no reason to think it'd be the same across the rest of Europe - that the proportion of bandwidth usage through increased homeworking isn't exceptional or unprecedented against past events.
As such I'd tend to agree with the GP
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Sure, sounds definitive. You know what is also abundant? Toilet paper. Supplies not stressed at all considering the prices are "dropping every year".
Re:Ah, the EU... (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.de-cix.net/en/abou... [de-cix.net]
Even if all companies in Europe were to operate exclusively remotely with staff all working from home, and the UEFA European Football Championship were to be broadcast in parallel, we would still be able to make the necessary bandwidth available for seamless interconnection.
While you're there, also take a look at their traffic statistics.
Re: Ah, the EU... (Score:2)
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And quoting the number from the second largest internet exchange in the world is relevant to all the smaller ones which are not coping how?
In other news Pure Soft has announced Toilet paper production is managing just fine, so clearly all your shops are full and your own reality is fake news because the largest company said they're okay right?
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actually inside each ISP
Each? I have a bridge to sell you. A virtual one. You can pick it up from your ISP, I'm sure they have it too.
Now if what you said were true then very little traffic from Netflix would travel over the world's backbones. Yet it still does. CDNs are great when you have them, but don't be under the delusion that there's one just parked in the street outside every house.
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Fast and cheap last-mile Internet! Backbone's as brittle as glass, though...
Brittle as glass? It seems to be holding up quite well considering it's served by the second largest exchange in the world (behind Brazil), and has these last two weeks seen set new world records for maximum throughput which has risen by a sustained several Terabytes/second.
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Torrents rule (Score:5, Insightful)
You can download torrents in any resolution and it doesn't stress the net.
Seconded. (Score:4, Insightful)
P2P, with hop distance awareness, is a muuch better solution than centralized control.
But go tell that to the Content Mafia. "Oh, but how can we steal from artists and consumers then? Baaawwwl! *cocainedeal tears*"
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I hope you're contributing that exact same comment on another thousand forums, so that we can get everyone on board with our new P2P overlords before the end of May, when our real problems begin.
Run, rabbit, run. A journey of a thousand forums begins with a single CTRL-C.
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I haven't used p2p to download anything for years and I'm massively out of the loop for the state-of-the-art. How many common p2p applications support hop distance awareness and is it enabled by default?
Without a lot of peers on your "local" network - which I would have guessed was the case in the majority of situations - you're still going to end up hauling traffic from far away, aren't you?
I can't see how having (say) a centralised Netflix caching server at your ISP would be worse performance/worse for th
Re:Torrents rule (Score:4, Interesting)
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It's always seemed kind of strange to me that big service providers haven't worked on ways to make more of their services P2P. I remember back in the late 2000s, early 2010s, Blizzard used P2P with direct download backup for their downloaders (which were literally a torrent layered on top of an executable, very easy to extract the underlying torrent). You can still find those "official" torrents on some sites eve
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It's always seemed kind of strange to me that big service providers haven't worked on ways to make more of their services P2P. I remember back in the late 2000s, early 2010s, Blizzard used P2P with direct download backup for their downloaders (which were literally a torrent layered on top of an executable, very easy to extract the underlying torrent). You can still find those "official" torrents on some sites even though they stopped using P2P like that. And I really don't know why they stopped using it, I'm sure it saved them money and it worked pretty well. And I loved it since I could download and seed their stuff right in my torrent client.
The problem with p2p distribution is that it used up customers transfer caps without them necessarily knowing leading to interrupted service or fines from their ISP. It could also impact their internet performance in a negative way. For similar reasons, Microsoft added a "metered" mode to Windows 10 which prevents downloading large updates, at least in theory.
It is one thing for a costumer to knowingly install a p2p application and use it but another if a business like Blizzard does it for them.
Aaahahanahaha! You lucky bastards! (Score:2)
Due to ... complications ... I had to live off of 8kB/s throttled LTE for a year now!
That's 144p with 10s pauses every 10s, all day, every day!
Oh how I wish to get SD! You lucky bastards! And they only hung me up the right way around, yesterday!
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144p, eh? Do you watch videos on a classic Game Boy by any chance? Because you're losing four lines of video if you do.
Probably unnecessary (Score:2)
I'd certainly prefer that that cat videos didn't clog up the tubes but this seems like it is largely unnecessary. You can check out the stats from dffernet internet exchanges, and on our local one you can definitely see a bump from a week ago [imgur.com] when quarantine measures started to take place, but it's hardly huge jump that ISPs wouldn't be ready for.
Of course just as I'm about to post this, everything ground almost to a halt. Doom is downloading at like 200KiB/s and some sites are taking forever to load. I'm s
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This is how the Internet was designed to work. Unless there is tomfuckery going on, then Internet access is "fair" by default. I am quite sure that Google is doing this for their own purposes and not for any other reason. That is, Google, having mixed non-entertainment and entertainment systems using the same limited shared resource have discovered that they had faulty planning and are incapable of supporting both at the same time. So they have decided to limit the things they "do not make money from di
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I'd certainly prefer that that cat videos didn't clog up the tubes but this seems like it is largely unnecessary. You can check out the stats from different internet exchanges, and on our local one you can definitely see a bump from a week ago [imgur.com] when quarantine measures started to take place, but it's hardly huge jump that ISPs wouldn't be ready for.
Of course just as I'm about to post this, everything ground almost to a halt. Doom is downloading at like 200KiB/s and some sites are taking forever to load. I'm sure it's just a coincidence and nothing to worry about though!
I don't think the problems are in the backbones but in the local infrastructure. At work, there are a number of people clustered in 2 geographical areas that are having repeated internet problems with Comcast - packet loss, high latency, etc. Users in other areas and providers aren't reporting problems. They didn't start reporting problems until the schools closed down, so this does seem to be load related. (even employees without children are reporting issues, so it's not a case of their LAN being overload
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In other words (Score:2)
You have to manually set the resolution back to 1080p now.
Automation plugin in 5, 4, 3...
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Automation plug ins for overriding shitty youtube defaults have been a thing for almost a decade at this point.
I use Enhancer for Youtube personally, because it lets me remove the absolute bullshit that is annotations in addition to setting specific preferred sets of quality settings in order of preference.
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Why? Sure, if you're watching YouTube movies on your large smart TV, but if you're watching most YouTube user content on your laptop, tablet, or smartphone, what's the point?
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My 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo can't handle 1080p you insensitive clod!
I don't care what YouTube says, I'm sticking to 480p!
Fucking morons in charge (Score:2)
Entirely unnecessary (Score:3)
The is purely down to posturing by an EU beaurocrat, Thierry Breton; a commissioner who's probably feeling left out right now and is trying to make himself important. He's probably never heard of a CDN.
Many ISPs have issued press releases to the effect that they are not experiencing any capacity issues right now, so a blanket reduction in streaming across the bloc is totally unnecessary. If one ISP in a particular country is experiencing issues, that's their problem and the rest of us shouldn't have to suffer.
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He's probably never heard of a CDN.
Is that why a multinational mega corporation chose to annoy their customers rather than correcting some politician on the record? When I first heard that the EU asked this I was ready to agree with you. When shortly after several companies agreed and lowered their bandwidth requirements to their own detriment I figured there's probably something more to this than a dumb politician.
Has anyone experienced problems? (Score:4, Informative)
Every ISP here in Denmark has said that they have seen increased usage but there’s plenty of bandwidth.
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Nope, it's the same story in the UK, BT has flat out said that they're not even seeing half of the bandwidth usage across the UK that they've seen during past events which they were also able to handle fine.
The backbones across Europe aren't the limiting factor in internet access, the last mile is. Britain's ageing last mile copper infrastructure that's still all too present in the vast majority of homes is what prevents internet speeds in the UK improving, not BT's 21cn backbone.
Come get yer hot fresh lies (Score:1)
If this channel had been around in December/Novemeber last year, it would have been broadcasting the "authoritative" news that Covid19 did not spread person to person. So take this "authoritative" feed with a massive grain of salt and doubt, with the understanding all it will say is what the government thinks you should hear.
I think it's sufficient for casual viewing. (Score:4)
On the other hand, for modern gaming, the difference between resolutions can get noticeable a lot faster. 720p is still usually fine, but you can really see the difference if you try to scale it up to fullscreen rather than running in a window. And anything below that tends to look pretty awful. Older games that were designed around lower resolutions still hold up just fine at those low resolutions, but try playing anything made in the past ten years at full screen 640x480 and prepare to barf.
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I have ran into a couple of videos on youtube lately that I could only stream in HD. When I try and manually set the quality, there are no other choices available.
I don't care a bit about HD when I'm watching videos in little square boxes. I find the inability to set the quality to something lower rather annoying.
In fact, I hate that so many things require going to my router to set the bandwidth they can use. I know how to do this, but everyone doesn't. And it's not always easy to set bandwidth limits on so
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I still stream and download most of my content in 720p or even 480p.
Netflix used to have an awesome feature - CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-S - which displayed a little menu that allowed you to pick your stream bitrate. I used to play Netflix in the background just to have some background noise, and I really liked being able to lower the bitrate to the lowest video setting and run it in a tiny window.
Unfortunately Netflix killed it a couple years ago and I don't think there's a replacement :(
Screw it (Score:2)