We have seen various services limit streaming quality for their products in a bid to ease congestion on what are currently overloaded Internet structures throughout the world. It seems that not only are streaming services having to lower their video quality but also other apps with WhatsApp joining the list overnight.
Facebook-owned WhatsApp has overnight announced that they are limiting the length of videos sent to WhatsApp Status halved to just 15 seconds. This is only occurring in India at this stage but we suspect that they will follow the other services’ actions and bring the temporary changes to their app to most countries in the world.
ANNOUNCEMENT:
You can no longer send videos to WhatsApp Status if they are longer than 16 seconds: only videos having a duration of 15 seconds will be allowed.
This is happening in India and it's probably an initiative to reduce the traffic on the server infrastructures.— WABetaInfo (@WABetaInfo) March 28, 2020
With over two billion users worldwide WhatsApp is the world’s most popular messaging platform, so much so that the Australian Government have made a Coronavirus channel for those after the latest accurate information. As such it is no surprise that they can make a difference to the world’s bandwidth availability with a small change such as this.
With our beleaguered NBN it is most likely just a matter of time before WhatsApp and others bring more of these types of changes to our shores. It is good to see services around the world adapting their apps to the current conditions and requirements of users.
