Wondering Why Your YouTube Video Quality Has Reduced? Here is the Reason

As more and more people stay home in a bid to curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, streaming platforms like youTube are beginning to put measures in place to ensure they can handle the traffic that comes as a result of increased viewership.

According to a new report, YouTube will no longer load High-Definition videos as its default response to queries from users.

This means that when anyone wants to watch a video from the streaming platform, YouTube will start playing the video with Standard Definition quality instead of the High-Definition quality that used to be the default YouTube video quality.

The platform is putting this measure in place to handle the expected upsurge in traffic and manage bandwidth.

Why is this important?

The rate at which people turn to video-on-demand platforms is bound to increase as they now have to stay home. Most people who work from home may take breaks with a quick trip to the Tube.

For folks who work from home, Youtube Kids is the new babysitter so that they can concentrate on work, not on the kids. Youtube isn’t the only platform anticipating this surge over the next weeks as Netflix, Microsoft and Sony have also put measures in place to ensure their bandwidth can cope with the heightened demand.

Microsoft and Sony have slowed down the rate of game downloads and updates to make sure that there are not too many users at peak periods than is advisable for the bandwidth.

A Youtube representative told Tech Crunch that as demand gets higher, “we have measures in place to automatically adjust our system to use less network capacity.”

Despite the measures put in place by Youtube, people will still be able to choose High-Definition quality if they are not satisfied with the quality of the Standard Definition rendered by default.

In the coming days, online and offline systems will undergo more stress as a ripple effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, proactive measures like Youtube’s latest move will help to make the bumps a little less uncomfortable as the world works its way back to normalcy.