The Prime Minister’s recent call for social distancing and total lockdown across the country has made people stay at their homes. This has also resulted in an unprecedented surge in mobile internet consumption.
Keeping in this mind, the digital industry is committed to ensuring that citizens are able to access mobile networks. The industry has dedicated to temporarily defaulting HD and ultra-HD streaming to SD content or offering only SD content, at bitrates no higher than 480p on cellular networks. These voluntary measures will be in effect until April 14. The decision was taken in a virtual meeting.
The meeting was organized yesterday by Uday Shankar, Chairman, Star & Disney India, with key stakeholders of the digital industry. The meeting, held virtually, was attended by NP Singh (Sony), Sanjay Gupta (Google), Ajit Mohan (Facebook), Sudhanshu Vats (Viacom18), Gaurav Gandhi (Amazon Prime Video), Punit Goenka (Zee), Nikhil Gandhi (Tiktok), Ambika Khurana (Netflix), Karan Bedi (MX Player) and Varun Narang (Hotstar).
This simply means that almost all the streaming services from Google, Facebook, Viacom 18, Amazon Prime Video, Hotstar, MX Player and more will offer video content at standard definition. Meanwhile, Netflix has also revealed that it will lower its traffic on internet networks by 25 per cent in India for 30 days. This will help reduce congestion on these networks. The streaming giant said that there will be minimal to no difference in video quality while streaming.