With 21 days of complete lockdown in India and the majority population working from home, the digital industry has decided to stream content on the standard quality resolution on the cellular networks.

This comes after a complete lockdown in the country announced by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi on March 24th led to an unprecedented surge in the mobile internet consumption.

“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 high definition (HD) and ultra-HD streaming to standard definition (SD) content or offering only SD content, at bitrates no higher than 480p on cellular networks. These voluntary measures will be in effect until April 14. All participants are immediately taking measures,” said the press statement.

Cellular Operators of Association of India (COAI) wrote a letter to the department of telecommunication and streaming platforms on March 22, to take technical measures to help ease the pressure on the infrastructure of telecom service providers.

“Given the crisis, we have developed a way to reduce Netflix’s traffic on telecommunications networks by 25% while also maintaining the quality of our service. So consumers should continue to get the quality that comes with their plan - whether it’s ultra-high, high or standard definition. We believe that this will provide significant relief to congested networks and will be deploying it in India for the next 30 days,” said Ken Florance, vice president, content delivery, Netflix said on March 24.

The digital industry meeting was organised yesterday by Uday Shankar, chairman of Star & Disney India and heads of Sony, Google, Facebook, Viacom18, Amazon Prime Video, Zee, TikTok, Netflix, MX player, and Hotstar were part of the meeting.

First Published:Mar 25, 2020 3:19 PM IST