As India entered into a complete lockdown from 24th March for a period of 21 days amid the rise of Coronavirus, the pressure on the internet bandwidth service increases because people are working from home.
To cope with the pressure, in a virtual meeting held on Tuesday, several OTT platforms such as Netflix, Hotstar, Facebook, TikTok, and others decided to stop HD and Ultra HD services to ease the load on the Internet bandwidth until April 14th.
“The digital industry has decided to act immediately in the larger national and consumer interest and to ensure the robustness of the cellular network. It was unanimously agreed that as an exceptional measure, all companies will immediately adopt measures, including temporarily defaulting HD and ultra-HD streaming to SD content or offering only SD content, at bitrates no higher than 480p on cellular networks," the statement issued after the meeting.
The meeting held on Tuesday was attended by key people from multiple OTT platforms.
Some key people were Uday Shankar, chairman, Star and Disney India, NP Singh (Sony), Sanjay Gupta (Google), Ajit Mohan (Facebook), Sudhanshu Vats (Viacom18), Gaurav Gandhi (Amazon Prime Video), Punit Goenka (Zee), Nikhil Gandhi (Tiktok), Ambika Khurana (Netflix), Karan Bedi (MX Player) and Varun Narang (Hotstar).
“We continue to work closely with governments and network operators around the globe to do our part to minimize stress on the system during this unprecedented situation. Last week, we announced that we were temporarily defaulting all videos on YouTube to standard definition in the European Union (EU). Given the global nature of this crisis, we will expand that change globally starting today," a spokesperson from Google said in a statement on Wednesday.
Story by Vaibhav Rai
Some points are taken from LiveMint
Image Credits: afmails.in
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