If you’ve heard of the whole brouhaha over Netflix admitting to throttling the video streaming quality for AT&T and Verizon users, then you’re probably either hating or loving them right now. (depends on which side of the argument you’re on) But now, the VOD service would like to give their users the option to choose what kind of quality you want to stream, depending on the kind of data usage policy that your carrier has.
If you’re using your mobile data to watch movies or TV shows on your mobile device and you have a smaller data plan, then you probably would want a lower quality stream, compared to when you’re streaming onto a larger screen. Of course this is to protect you from having to pay overage fees in case you go beyond your allowed data usage. But if you have a larger mobile data plan, then you’d still want a higher quality one.
Right now, the default bitrate for viewing on mobile devices is 600 kilobits per second. Netflix claims that it “hasn’t been an issue” for their users. But given the reaction that the AT&T and Verizon subscribers had when they first suspected their carriers were throttling their Netflix streams, then maybe people aren’t that indifferent to it.
Netflix said this data saver feature will be available for their mobile apps sometime this May. They actually haven’t released much details about the feature, except to give users a broad overview of what it will entail and to give them an understanding of why they need to do it.
SOURCE: Netflix
