Nest lowers video quality of its cameras to save bandwidth

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Google will lower the video quality of its Nest Cams to save bandwidth. The adjustment is undone by users and they will be notified in the Nest app if the quality settings have actually been adjusted.

Google has sent an e-mail to owners of the products about this, as is apparent from, among other things: notifications from users on Twitter. The e-mail states that the camera quality is being adjusted to save on ‘internet resources’. The quality and bandwidth setting will be adjusted to the default setting sometime in the next few days. It is a temporary change. Users who simply want to maintain the highest quality settings can do so by choosing the highest quality again in the settings after the adjustment.

When communicating about this measure, the company behind the Nest cameras refers to the problems that Covid-19 has caused in the community. A Google spokesperson tells TechCrunch, among other things, that this adjustment is intended to prioritize internet bandwidth for learning and work purposes.

For example, according to Google, the Nest Cam IQ has a monthly data usage of 400GB in normal daily use if the highest quality and bandwidth setting applies. That drops to 300 or 200GB at the ‘medium’ and ‘medium’ settings respectively. With the Nest Cam, monthly data usage is 300GB on the highest setting, or 120GB on ‘medium’ and 30GB on ‘low’; with the Nest Hello video doorbell, it’s 300, 150 and 50GB.

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