Netflix prepares for the threat of a new global lockdown. They will re-code its entire catalog with 4K quality and HDR and HFR support. Last spring with the arrival of the global pandemic, intense usage of streaming services became a burden to the network. This re-encoding aims to avoid the situation experienced.
While half the world spent March, April and May in quarantine, the network was facing a heavy workload. Services like Netflix had to take some drastic measures to prevent this.
- Netflix will remove free first month trial
- Redesigned Netflix menu will show new series and movies at a glance
- How to tell if someone is using your Netflix or Spotify account?
Netflix thinks that the user would have the same experience and notice the least possible change with a reduction in bitrate. The goal is to cut 25% of the network traffic with this measure.
Netflix prepares for the threat of a new global lockdown recoding its entire catalog with 4K quality and HDR and HFR support. This way, users will be able to continue viewing their contents in 4K consuming less bit rate.
Instead of reducing the quality of the content, as requested by the European Union during the lockdown, Netflix wants to ensure that its service maintains the quality promised in each subscription plan, but without saturating the network. Netflix prepares for the threat of a new global lockdown between the winter and the virus security measures, traffic could increase again in the coming months.
As they explain in their press release: “We have developed algorithms such as optimization of encryption per title and dynamic optimization per shot”. Netflix claims that their new encoding approach can halve the bit rate for a 4K video without affecting image quality: “On average we need 50% less bit rate to achieve the same quality with the optimized scale”.
Besides protecting the network from possible saturation due to increased traffic, the company assures that this system brings them other advantages. One would be a higher and more stable initial quality, that is, the quality will suffer less drops during reproduction. This new system also provides an acceleration at the beginning, according to the company, it’s 10% faster now. Netflix prepares for the threat of a new global lockdown with these measures, let’s see if they can manage to do so.
