Slowing the stream

By G.F. | SEATTLE

ON A typical home network, video is by far the biggest bandwidth hog. Streaming and downloading it dwarf all other online activity, especially if, like Babbage and Mrs Babbage, a household forgoes cable or satellite television. With their own (modest) viewing habits and small children's addiction to "Bob the Builder", they burn through at least 75GB of video each month.

Soon they may face additional costs. Broadband providers in America have increasingly turned to broadband usage caps, with monthly limits of 100-250GB, with some firms cancelling service thereafter and others charging overage fees. Caps are not entirely unreasonable. After all, people who gulp down vast draughts of bandwidth might be expected to pay more than less grasping users. However, Babbage suspects that the caps are being put in place to deter consumers from finding alternatives to subscription-based television services fed via coaxial cable or fibre-optic connections.

Netflix, which streams, among other things, "Bob the Builder", now offers customers a nifty way to prevent accidental breaches of the caps. The setting was added without fanfare, but caught the eye of the networking site Connected Planet. Subscribers may choose among three levels of bandwidth usage. Good quality uses up to 300MB per hour; better, up to 700MB; and best up to 1GB for standard video and 2.3GB for high definition (HD). In other words, one could stream non-stop for a whole month at "good" without exceeding a 250 GB cap, but would hit the limit after just four and a half days with HD.

The company already throttles quality based on a subscriber's bandwidth congestion. This Babbage has occasionally watched streamed video in which recognisable action is replaced by large blobs of colour swarming through space (and no, he was not enjoying a classic sci-fi horror at the time). Often, though, even low quality is highly watchable, and high-quality versions of some shows are not available in any case.

Few companies are likely to follow in Netflix's footsteps (even it is not advertising the option too loudly). Providers are rarely keen, in effect, to nobble themselves for no immediate commercial reason—it should, after all, be in the viewer's interest to keep tabs on his broadband usage. But Netfix's dominant position in the market for streaming means it can permit itself the luxury of making life easier for customers. Sandvine, a network-research outfit, reports that "real-time entertainment" comprises nearly half of wired broadband traffic during daily peak periods. Netflix makes up a sizeable portion of that. That portion may swell further if customers come to believe that it not only offers quality fare, but a helping hand as well.