Now is the time for streaming services to start saving bandwidth and save the Internet

As the use of streaming services and video conferencing tools lately increased so much that the politicians in the EU specifically asked Netflix to lower their quality (lower the bitrate) and reduce the impact on Internet. Also, YouTube did the same, and lowered the maximum bandwidth.

Netflix works extremely hard to not waste any bits in their encodings and they invented a video quality measurement called VMAF to measure all their assets to make sure they won’t waste any bandwidth. This is something that all streaming services would need to do to keep their bit rates as low as possible without decreasing the visual quality. Measuring the visual quality is not just good for the internet bandwidth, but rather a great way of lowering the network traffic and storage costs of a streaming service.

This has not been the focus for streaming services operating on markets with good Internet connectivity and a lot of services are still using the same highest bit rates for all their content they encode and distribute. But since all movies are different, the highest bitrate must be different for all movies as well.

“The easiest way to get started is to deprecate the ‘static bitrate ladders’ in the video encodings and start to measure the outputs using VMAF.”, explains Kennet Eriksson, video streaming expert at Eyevinn Technology.

The tools needed to use VMAF to measure quality are available for free as open source and all streaming services should provide their consumers with the best possible video quality with only the bits and bytes needed to deliver that.

“Maybe it is time for the consumers to put a demand on their favorite streaming service to start measuring and optimizing this as it is now known that available network bandwidth is a sparse resource both in your local network at home but also on a global scale.”, adds Kennet Eriksson.

Even though the tools might be free it can be a challenge to get started without the know-how. To help everyone get started Eyevinn is now offering a discounted price for their Video Streaming Quality - Benchmark Services where VMAF is one part of that toolbox.

Contact sales@eyevinn.se for information about pricing.