Google is doing its part to help preserve internet bandwidth amid the COVID-19 lockdown and everybody staying home and being online.
For its Nest cameras, the company plans to lower camera quality settings by default, which will happen this week.
A Google spokesperson told TechCrunch, “To answer the global call to prioritize internet bandwidth for learning and working, in the next few days we’re going to be making a few changes. We believe these changes have the potential to help make it easier for communities to keep up with school, work, and everything in between.”
The change means over the next few days, you’ll see video quality settings change to default, which is in the middle setting between ‘low’ and ‘high’. Users still will be able to manually increase the settings to high if necessary.
A Nest Cam Outdoor, for example, uses about 300GB per month in bandwidth at the ‘High’ setting. Changing it to the middle setting lowers this number to 120GB per month of bandwidth use.
Other companies such as Crave, Netflix and YouTube have lowered video quality for the sake of preserving internet bandwidth during the coronavirus pandemic.
