Last week, Netflix announced that it would reduce the quality of video streaming in Europe for the next 30 days in order to reduce the strain on the Internet infrastructure. Today, Bloomberg reported that YouTube will also take steps to reduce the impact of streaming video.

Streaming video services have seen a significant increase in usage due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with requests for social distancing and, in some areas, mandatory orders keeping people indoors. 2019 Sandvine reports that video streaming accounted for more than 60% of global Internet downstream volume. At the time, Netflix was much larger in the Americas, at 6.3 percent versus 12.9 percent for YouTube, but a recent report shows that YouTube has overtaken Netflix, sometimes by nearly double, due to the coronavirus outbreak According to the report.

The site cites two factors for this change: that more people are watching YouTube "because it is a great source of information from a variety of sources," which, frankly, is a bit suspect. Instead, usage at home is spreading to more time slots.

Unlike Netflix, which has reduced the bitrate of all streams by 25%, YouTube simply sets all videos to play in standard definition by default. Users can still watch in high resolution, but they must manually increase the resolution to do so.

YouTube already defaults to standard-definition playback in Europe, and will roll this out worldwide." We continue to work closely with governments and network operators around the world to do our part to minimize stress on the system during this unprecedented situation," YouTube's parent company, Google, said in a statement. Last week we announced that all YouTube videos in the European Union will temporarily be in standard definition." Given the global nature of this crisis, we are extending this change to the entire world starting today."

Netflix announced today that it will also reduce the bit rate of its service in Australia, but has not yet extended the reduction to North America. Amazon also reduced streaming bitrates for its Prime Video service in Europe.