After the news broke that Netflix was throttling video streams of Verizon and AT&T customers, Netflix said that it was working on “new ways to give members more control in choosing their video quality.” That tool is launching today.
Netflix is rolling out a Cellular Data Usage tool that will let you choose the quality of the video that you’re streaming. However, Netflix doesn’t break each option down into options like 720p, 1080p, and so on. Instead, it gives you an estimate of how much video you can watch when using 1GB of data. So on the Low setting, you can get four hours per gigabyte, while the High setting will get you one hour per gigabyte.
Netflix said that it was throttling AT&T and Verizon customers’ streams in order to protect them from going over their data caps, but now Netflix is giving users the ability to control exactly how much data they use and the quality of the video that they get. Lots of folks will probably just leave it on automatic and let Netflix handle the quality setting, but advanced users — especially those on unlimited plans — will likely be happy that they can now get high-quality video on the go.