AT&T begins to roll out Stream Saver video throttling feature

AT&T announced plans to launch its new Stream Saver feature for qualified plans back in November. Now the carrier is informing its customers that this feature has been enabled by default.

As first reported by Android Police, emails announcing the launch of Stream Saver began to be sent to AT&T users late this week. As previously reported, this feature will throttle many, but not all, online high-definition video streams down to standard 480p video resolutions. At the time this was announced, this was supposed to help save the use of data for customers who had limited allotments. The feature is also enabled on AT&T’s GoPhone pre-paid plans.

While this is now a default feature, customers can turn Stream Saver off by going to the AT&T web site and its “Manage my data” account page. Once it is turned off, AT&T says that users should wait five minutes and then perform a full reboot of their smartphone for the change to fully take effect.

Of course, much has changed between AT&T’s Stream Saver announcement in November and today. Customers can now sign up to use AT&T’s stand alone unlimited plans. That includes the carrier’s $90 a month Unlimited Plus plan, which supports HD video streaming, although overall download speeds are throttled down for the rest of the month if customers use more than 22GB of data per billing cycle.

What do you think of AT&T enabling Stream Saver by default? Are they just looking out for their customers who have limited data caps, or should they introduced the feature and not forced it on their users? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!