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Netflix to reduce bandwidth by 20 percent

Netflix has announced that it is working on a new video encoding system to deal with increasing levels of traffic.

Netflix has announced that it is working on a new video encoding system to deal with increasing levels of traffic.

The streaming service is looking to reduce bandwidth by an estimated 20 percent, without sacrificing the video quality. With a reported subscription base topping 60 million, with each user steaming 45 gigabytes ever month, Netflix pushed approximately 329,400,000,000 gigabytes of data in 2015.

Netflix expect to have an initial 1,000 re-encoded videos completed by the end of March next year, with an entire petabyte finished by 2017.

The new encoding system makes use of idle server space during off-peak hours by automatically re-encoding its library.

It will encode from the raw source material more intelligently, taking into consideration whether or not the material itself can benefit from higher bit-rates, or whether the same quality can be maintained despite taking up less space and bandwidth.