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> Almost all video streaming services will downgrade the stream quality if they get a 1.5Mbps pipe, and any that don't are at a competitive disadvantage to anyo
by jsight 11y ago
> Almost all video streaming services will downgrade the stream quality if they get a 1.5Mbps pipe, and any that don't are at a competitive disadvantage to anyone who is streaming from a phone and who actually only has a 1.5Mbps pipe.
Yep, and this actually has some really annoying side effects for people with a lot of bandwidth but a low data cap. A lot of services have ways to manually control it, but some are surprisingly obtuse about it (Netflix).
- netneutralish 11y agoNetflix uses adaptive streaming to stream their videos. It is inherently a greedy algorithm; if the stream determines there is bandwidth available, without a throttle Netflix will try to go to 1080p (or whatever the highest bitrate available for that stream). Consumers with LTE phones + data caps benefit the most from BingeOn. Possibly, they are a significant % of T-Mo consumers and are happy with the trade-off.