Users Should Control Streaming Video Bitrates

 In Blogs & Bloggers

There has been a good deal of controversy over mobile video throttling in the last few months. From T-Mobile dialing back video quality with their Binge on program to Netflix admitting to throttling it’s own service on certain networks.

While throttling certainly has benefits for both service providers and consumers, the decision to trade off image quality for lower data consumption should be in the hands of the user. The key advantage to dialing back the video quality is that the user can watch a lot more videos. On a 10GB data plan, users can watch 4.9 hours of video at 1080p or 29.6 hours at 480p—over 5x as much!

Bitrates used in calculations are YouTube, H.264

Users won’t be able to tell the difference between a 1080p video and a 720p video on small tablet and cellular screens. In fact, on smaller screens it’s hard to even tell the difference between 720p and 480p:

The other benefit of streaming a lower bitrate video is less stalling and rebuffering, especially on congested networks.

Since users should have the freedom to choose whether or not they want higher quality or more watch time, Mobolize has put the power back in their hands with Data Doubler. Users can set the app to automatically dial down the size of the videos, so that they can watch more each month without worrying about going over the data plan. They can even select what quality version they’d like to get to make sure that the videos are always nice and crisp on their mobile devices!

If you haven’t checked our Data Doubler yet, download the Mobolize app now.

Recommended Posts

Start typing and press Enter to search