Verizon tops Netflix ISP charts as per-title encoding introduced


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Joseph O'Halloran

| 17 December 2015




Quality of service is the killer app for all online video services and Netflix has revealed not only the best providers of its service but plans to further enhance quality of its content.



The Netflix ISP index is designed to provide a measure of prime time Netflix performance on a particular ISP network with faster performance generally meaning better picture quality, quicker start times and fewer interruptions.

For November 2015, Telecable in Spain took the top spot, delivering an average monthly speed of 4.15Mbps while arch rival Telefónica - Movistar ranked last with an average speed of 2.15Mbps. In the US Verizon was found to be delivering the leading SVOD service at higher speed than rivals in the US at 3.83Mbps, a considerable rise from the 3.27Mbps it clocked up in November 2014. Cox, in second place, rose to 3.76Mbps from 3.11Mbps a year ago, with BrightHouse, Cablevision and others showing similar gains.

Japan’s NIFTY, jumped ten spots to fifth place with an average speed of 3.81Mbps while UPC Cablecom in Switzerland fell three spots to last place, with an average speed of 3.81Mbps, down from 4.12Mbps last month.

Yet what may boost quality more than a fast connection could well be the mass introduction of per-title encoding. This has been under development at Netflix for some time and has involved the company running analysis on an individual title to determine the optimal encoding recipe based on its complexity.

For example, a film containing action scenes could well need more bits to encapsulate the information versus unchanging landscape scenes or animation that need less. This, said Netflix, will allow it to deliver the same or better experience while using less bandwidth, which it believes is particularly important in lower bandwidth countries and as it expands to places where video viewing often happens on mobile networks.