With many people being forced to stay home during this pandemic the overall infrastructure of the internet is being somewhat taxed by far more people than normal using it for video watching, gaming, teleconferencing, what have you, at any given time. While the overall infrastructure seems like it can handle the overall load the fact remains that this is still a strain on resources and some of the biggest companies out there are doing what they can to keep the per-user data flow that bit lower. This news comes from an article on Wired which focuses on YouTube but brings up Microsoft and Sony as following similar.
The focus on YouTube is on the fact that they will begin defaulting users to lower quality video — normally the site will default to HD or greater quality, depending on your connection speed, but to save on overall bandwidth they will be defaulting to lower quality non-HD resolutions (360p or 480p) with the user having the option to manually adjust it to a higher resolution if they feel they must.
The article does mention also that in Europe other streaming services have done as well, which is a good step, but we need them all globally to do such for at least the foreseeable, given the bandwidth usage of a given HD or 4K stream from a high quality service provider — 720 would suffice for most everything during this crisis.
With that said, the article does go on to discuss Microsoft and Sony limiting transfer speeds during “peak hours” for users of their Xbox and PlayStation gaming platforms, respectively. Let me stress that, unlike the subject of a previous article I wrote, we’re not talking about data being used for multiplayer games — we’re talking about game downloads, updates, and the like — the big file transfers that always seem to take forever before you can finally get to a game. These are large files, often in the gigabyte size ranges, and are just as much of an issue as any single movie stream. That being said, they are generally one-and-done affairs, as opposed to a video stream which, once you’re done watching a movie you’re likely to just begin streaming another one, and thus I still feel they are the biggest issue to overall bandwidth usage, but I’ve no objections to this being done on Xbox and PlayStation end of things as well to help with overall congestion on the networks — people need to learn some damn patience anyway, in my opinion, and if they have nothing but time on their hands for the next few weeks (or longer) then waiting an hour for a game update won’t kill them — they can play something else, watch something else or, hell, do something else in any capacity in the meantime.
Additionally, allowing systems to auto-update (as most responsible users should and would anyway) would help eliminate waiting for anything but new game purchases which, again, unless you’re just now getting a new console and are just getting to installing games, you should have something old to play while the new game installs and downloads updates.
Remember, we all need to do our part, where possible, during this crisis. If a video being a bit lower quality or a game taking longer to update is the price I have to pay so a person can skype call their doctor, or a child can do a class online without issues? That’s a price I’m more than willing to pay.
Stay safe out there.