Newsletter
Perhaps you’ve been there before. You’re minding your own business and enjoying the fruits of your labor by binge watching your favorite shows on Netflix, thanks to the subscription that you paid for with your hard-earned money. Then all of a sudden you hit your monthly data limit because you’ve been streaming your favorite shows on your smartphone all day. While many people don’t run into this issue at all, plenty still do, and Netflix now seems to have a native fix for that as they’ve recently started introducing a way to save on data within the official Netflix app. The feature is aimed at letting users configure and adjust the amount of data that they use while streaming so they can avoid going over their limits, which, in most cases these days may not result in fees, but it can end up throttling data.
The feature opens up a list of configurable options for users to pick how they want to watch shows when they stream on their mobile devices, and includes options for watching only when connected to WiFi, an unlimited watch option which lets users stream as much as they want at the highest quality, as well as a low option that lets users stream four hours of content per GB of data, a medium option for streaming about 2 hours of content per GB of data, and a high option for streaming about 1 hour of content per GB of data.
There’s also a default “Auto” toggle that sets the amount of time to three hours per GB too which is likely to be the setting that many users leave it on initially. Whatever users choose from the start can be changed at any time so there’s no worry of being stuck on a particular option. Data usage can fluctuate for users from month to month, so the new feature from Netflix is flexible enough to shift and accommodate when need be. The option already appears to be live although it’s unclear of this was a complete roll out to all users or if it’s a slow roll out heading out to users in batches. Users can find this option in app settings, which is accessible from the hamburger menu at the left edge. Alongside the data saver, Netflix is also set to receive Google Play carrier billing in the near future.
