Reduced streaming quality and better compression

Following Netflix’s lead, Google, iFlix and iWant has heeded the National Telecommunication Commission’s (NTC) call to manage the bitrate used by its streaming services to ease the burden on Philippine networks as a record number of people work from home.

Google is applying the same data-saving steps in the Philippines as they’ve done in other countries, namely defaulting the quality of YouTube videos to SD instead of HD.

iFlix meanwhile, has capped its streaming service and will no longer stream content at 4K resolution for the meantime. iFlix claims that their platform uses the least amount of data to stream video in the Philippines.

Meanwhile iWant will reduce its streaming bitrate by 33% by March 27.