As you would be aware about the outbreak of Covid-19, novel Corona Virus pandemic situation across the Globe, Europe is one among the most affected continents with Italy topping the charts in the number of cases as of now.

Due to the pandemic situation, the countries are in Lockdown mode with many of people staying at home and working from home wherever possible. With increasing number of people staying at home, the usage of Over the top (OTT) video streaming services have increased a lot. This is putting a huge load on the Internet Infrastructure of the world due to increased internet usage than on normal days.

Facebook with about 300 Million users in Europe has just enough users to increase the internet load on IT Infrastructure of Internet service providers. To restrict the heavy internet usage in order to ensure availability of internet bandwidth for important work, Facebook has decided to reduce the Video Quality of the videos streamed via its Facebook and Instagram platforms. They will be reducing the Video bit rate so that the data usage is reduced. This would help in de-congestion of the network infrastructure to enable fair usage of internet for all.

In India, Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) has also written to the OTT video streaming service providers to reduce the video quality to decongest the stressed network in these times when people are using it for important business works while availing work from home options provided by many IT employers across the country.

Department of Telecom (DoT) has also written to government to issue an advisory in this regard to the video streaming service providers. Recently Apple and Amazon had also announced their plans to reduce video quality within their streaming services to ensure less stress on telecom infrastructures.