As somebody that works for an ISP and is responsible for our customer access network. I can say that honestly I haven't noticed any trend in the last week that has me concerned. Even with people working from home and the schools closed down peak hour usage is still the same as it was before. There has been almost no change in our customer peak usage for the past month straight. What I have noticed is that normally during the day I would notice a slow increase through the day with it starting to increase more around 3 - 4 in the afternoon (when kids start to get home from school) then peak between 7 and 9 pm. Now the morning starts with it jumping up by 9 or 10 am to the level that it normally would be around 3 or 4 and holds there for the day. If anything there has been maybe a 3 - 5% increase of bandwidth during the day. We are actually going to boost our residential customer speeds for the next few months and I have no concern of that impacting our network even though I will still have my guys monitor it and upgrade segments of the network if / as needed.
So I don't see a need for Netflix or youtube to do this in the USA. Depending on the area some networks already have people using these services most of the time anyway. If everyone is already streaming every night as it is, it is hard to get worse than that. When you get to the rural areas I see that being more and more common. If you live in a big city you go out and do stuff. But when you are 2 or 3 hours from a large city or even 45 - 50 minutes from a small city that has even a 2 screen theater you are going to be staying at home most nights anyway and streaming stuff. If I want to fly somewhere I am driving 2 hours to get to one airport, 3 to get to another. Same to get to any zoo or museum. So those things aren't on my list of things to do. Most of the movies I watch are on Netflix or Vudu as otherwise a 2 hour movie becomes almost a 4 hour chunk of my day by the time I drive there and back and add in some extra time to get there early to get a good seat.
So I don't see a need for Netflix or youtube to do this in the USA. Depending on the area some networks already have people using these services most of the time anyway. If everyone is already streaming every night as it is, it is hard to get worse than that. When you get to the rural areas I see that being more and more common. If you live in a big city you go out and do stuff. But when you are 2 or 3 hours from a large city or even 45 - 50 minutes from a small city that has even a 2 screen theater you are going to be staying at home most nights anyway and streaming stuff. If I want to fly somewhere I am driving 2 hours to get to one airport, 3 to get to another. Same to get to any zoo or museum. So those things aren't on my list of things to do. Most of the movies I watch are on Netflix or Vudu as otherwise a 2 hour movie becomes almost a 4 hour chunk of my day by the time I drive there and back and add in some extra time to get there early to get a good seat.