Netflix's Ongoing Quest To Save Bandwidth

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Netflix has a bandwidth problem. It currently represents 36.5 percent of U.S. Internet traffic and it's going to increase as 4K becomes more popular, and LTE and fiber Internet improve. As Variety reported, the company is taking a first step by re-encoding its entire catalog with more granular bitrates. This move should lead to 20 percent in bandwidth savings. Here's the company's reasoning. Depending on the type of content that you watch, Netflix shouldn't use the same bitrate for everything. For instance, an episode of The Simpsons with its limited color palette and camera movements doesn't need the same bitrate as The Hunger Games. The company has worked with researchers at the University of Southern California, the University of Nantes and the UT Austin to come up with an algorithm that scans each episode or movie to determine its complexity. On average, a 1080p Simpsons episode will be much smaller ...