We’re weeks into various stay-at-home initiatives to stop the spread of the coronavirus and to say that broadband networks are strained at this point is an understatement. We’ve seen high-traffic services like Netflix and YouTube adjust how their users can view their streaming videos to help ease that strain. Now it’s Google’s Nest that is also making some adjustments by reducing the quality of videos captured by your Nest cameras. It’s an understandable move as more people are accessing the Internet now that they’re working, studying, or entertaining themselves at home.
Basically, what will happen now is that if your Nest’s camera quality and bandwidth are set to something higher than the default, they will be rolling it back to the default that they have set. But if you’re already streaming at a lower quality, then nothing will change. That is the only change that you can expect from them for now and you should receive a notification if ever they have automatically made changes to your streaming quality.
Nest assures users that this is just a temporary change as they and other Internet-related products are trying to adjust to a world where the current priority is for learning and working. They also clarified that only the quality and bandwidth settings will be modified and “all other settings will stay the same.” Core features will continue to function as they should so there should be no fear that security is being compromised to adjust to the current normal.
If for some reason you still need higher quality for your security camera, you can still change it back anytime you want to. Just head on over to your camera settings to change it back to your previous high quality setting. But of course, we’re all being asked to help ease the bandwidth strain so there will be enough quality internet to go around so if you don’t need to do that, just stick to the default settings.
The changes should be rolling out to Nest users in the U.S. You will get a notification that it is being applied to your account and there’s no need to do anything anyway.
