Containment: YouTube suspends HD video playback to relieve European networks

Bandwidth freed up to avoid saturation. Solicited from all sides by teleworking companies or those who are bored, European Internet networks are holding up well, but are sometimes suffering with slowdowns.

The European Commission on Wednesday called on broadcast platforms and operators to take steps to ease the pressure on the internet. Video-on-demand giant Netflix answered the call on Thursday by further compressing the bitrate of its videos and audio to free up bandwidth.

Owned by Alphabet (ex-Google), YouTube followed suit on Thursday evening. "We are committed to temporarily switching all our traffic in the European Union to Standard definition by default," the free video service announced in a statement. The reduction will apply for 30 days.

"Although we have only seen a few peaks in the use of our platform, we have devices in place to automatically adjust our system to mobilize less network capacity," says the Californian giant.

Not effective before the weekend

Since this decision, all videos should be displayed in less detail in 480p quality. After verification, it was still possible this Friday morning to change the default definition to 1080p, ie High Definition.

This technical adjustment should in fact take "a few hours to a few days to be deployed for everyone," says one at YouTube.

Video streaming alone represents 60% of the world's downstream traffic, according to the latest figures from the American specialist Sandvine. But this percentage rises to 65% for the mobile Internet network, the network with the most stress.

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YouTube accounts for 25% of global information packet exchanges on mobile networks. A slight - somewhat forced - reduction in its impact on traffic would therefore have immense leverage to free up bandwidth.

To demonstrate digital citizenship - and avoid paralysis - it is advisable to favor downloads of content during off-peak hours, preferably after 11 pm, and to connect to wi-fi as much as possible to also relieve mobile networks .