Netflix Intro’s Bandwidth Management Tools For Those Streaming In Canada [Netflix Streaming In Canada Is Now More Bandwidth Friendly With Options To Choose Good, Better Or Best Video Quality]

Posted on TFTS by Robert Nelson on Tuesday, 29. March 2011 under: Audio,Visual, PCs, Notebooks, Netbooks & Tablets

Netlix seems to be taking care of their Canadian subscribers lately, just yesterday we saw the Paramount news which meant additional content and today we are learning of a new option to manage video quality.

And while many would assume you would want to manage the video quality up to the highest possible resolution, for those in Canada, this seems to be more amount managing bandwidth usage. And just to offer an example, Netflix has stated that “viewing 30 hours of Netflix could consume as much as 70 GBytes, if it was all in HD.”

Anyway, with this new video quality manager, Canadian Netflix users now have the option to choose from a few settings. And with the lowest setting, that could take the overall bandwidth usage down by two/thirds. In other words, you can now stream more without having to worry about using your full allotment.

As for the settings, they include three options — Good, Better and Best and break down as follows;

1. “Good” – The default setting with good picture quality and lowest data use per hour (about 0.3 GBytes/hour)
2. “Better” – Better picture quality and medium data use per hour (about 0.7 GBytes/hour)
3. “Best” – Best picture quality and highest date use per hour (generally about 1.0 GBytes/hour – or up to 2.3 GBytes/hour when streaming HD content)

Best of all, the settings can be changed and adjusted at any time by visiting the “Manage Video Quality” page in the “Your Account” section of the Netflix website. Otherwise, the Good setting limits video/audio to 625 kbps/64 kbps, the Better setting limits video/audio to a maximum of 1300 kbps/192 kpbs and the Best setting offers the highest quality files which are 4800 kbps (for 1080p HD video) and 384 kbps audio (for 5.1 audio).

And as an interesting little side fact, Netflix noted that frequent starts and stops or frequent rewinds and fast-forwards will “slightly increase” the amount of bandwidth you are using because of the additional data required for each buffer period.