Starting next month, YouTube has announced it will be defaulting to the standard definition (SD) worldwide.

This comes in due to the fact that many people are now cooped up at home and discouraged from going out, measures taken to battle the ongoing pandemic.

Last week, they introduced the SD setting for Europe as a measure to cope with streaming demands from many households. Of course, it’s also to help ease the internet infrastructure as more people stream videos at home.

Now, that measure will be introduced globally. Instead of starting immediately, though, YouTube generously decided to let the rest of the world ease into it.

While YouTube will start playing videos at SD (480p) by default, users can still opt to use HD (720p or higher) by clicking on that little gear on the bottom right side of the video player.

It sounds a little counterproductive, honestly, if the desired effect is to ease bandwidth and demand for video streaming if everyone can just default back to HD themselves.

But defaulting to SD does make a significant impact. I dare say that most of us who watch videos on YouTube wouldn’t really mind the quality difference as long as the picture is clear enough for our eye to see.

If you do mind, though, then I guess you can just switch back to HD.

Just saying though, many people are cooped up in their homes like we are. We should be caring enough to help lessen the broadband strain and allow more people to enjoy watching videos.

At the moment, YouTube plans to make the change for only a month, though that will entirely depend on how much longer people are going to stay home.