Canadian Netflix Members Now Able to Reduce Data Usage to Meet Data Caps

From DailyTech: Netflix announced yesterday that it would reduce data usage for its Canadian members in an effort to comply with data caps in this area. Neil Hunt, chief product officer at Netflix, made the announcement on the Netflix Blog allowing Canadians to enjoy video streaming through Netflix without data cap worries.

Canadians have experienced recent troubles regarding data, such as the CRTC's decision to end unlimited use internet plans. Many Canadian ISPs "enforce monthly caps on the total amount of data consumed." In addition, AT&T is looking to place new data caps on DSL and U-Verse customers here in the U.S.

Now, Netflix is stepping up to make Canadian members' lives easier by lowering data usage by two-thirds. According to Hunt, Canadians can now watch 30 hours of Netflix video streaming per month and use only 9 GB of data. Before the data reduction, 30 hours of video streaming would use 70 GB of data.

Hunt also noted that the reduced data has only a small impact on video quality, but the picture continues to be satisfactory. In fact, a Netflix member can adjust data usage and picture quality with three settings that Netflix created.

The three settings are "Good," which is the default setting with the low data use per hour of 0.3 GB; "Better," which has better picture quality and uses 0.7 GB per hour, and "Best," which has the highest picture quality and uses 1.0 GB per hour or 2.3 GB per hour when streaming HD.

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