Netflix on Monday announced that it will switch to lower-quality video streaming for its customers in Canada in order to preserve bandwidth.
The default setting for video streaming in the country going forward will use two-thirds less data, but could result in lower picture quality, Neil Hunt, chief product officer, said in a blog post. There will be the option to switch to higher-quality streams, however.
"We made these changes because many Canadian Internet service providers unfortunately enforce monthly caps on the total amount of data consumed," Hunt wrote.
With the changes, Canadian customers can watch about 30 hours of streaming per month and consume about 9 GBytes of data. Previously users could consume up to 70GB per month if the movies were in HD, or 30GB on average, Hunt said.
"While there is some lessening of picture quality with these new settings, the experience continues to be great," he wrote.
For those who want to risk bumping up against their bandwidth caps in exchange for higher quality streams, Netflix said that can be managed under "Manage Video Quality" via "Your Account."
Netflix created three settings: good, better, and best. "Good" is the default setting and provides the lowest data use per hour, or about 0.3GB per hour and 9GB per month. With the "better" setting, picture quality is improved, but it consumes about 0.7GB of data per hour and 20GB per month.
The highest setting, or "best," eats up about 1GB per hour, or up to 2.3GB when streaming HD content. Netflix said that only a few movies and TV shows are available at its highest rate of 4800 kbps for 1080p HD video and 384 kbps audio for 5.1 audio, which could up about 67GB per month. Non-HD content, however, would consume about 31GB per month at the "best" setting.
"At all settings, Netflix adaptive streaming may choose a lower data rate stream if your connection is lower speed or, in the case of congestion, in order to minimize interruptions," Hunt said.
Netflix said that frequent starts and stops, or rewind/seek activity will also consume a bit more bandwidth, though likely on a few minutes' worth.
The news comes the same day that Netflix inked a five-year deal with Paramount Pictures for the rights to stream its films to Canadian customers. In the next few months, Netflix will add 350 Paramount films to its Canadian lineup, which started with "The Last Airbender" and Marvel's "Iron Man 2" on March 25.
Also this week, Canadian ISP Rogers Communications admitted that it is throttling activity on Blizzard's "World of Warcraft" gaming platform due to a "problem" with its traffic management.