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Again, the people who run worldwide video streaming services know exactly how many customers are bandwidth limited, and they know which of the many Adaptive Bit Rate renditions (tiers) their customers are streaming. When customers can't sustain higher bit rates, the client player application requests the lowest bit rate rendition from the server. The video service provider has logs of all of this activity, so they know what % of streams are at the lowest bit rate tier, and where/when this happens. Some have tiers as low as 100 kbps (including about 10 kbps for mono audio). With HEVC, this tier is watchable, even if the picture size is reduced to 320x240. It's not possible at all with AVC. For those in rural parts of the world where the best they can get is a 2G mobile connection, they're thrilled to get super-low bit rate video, as long as they can tell what's happening, and they don't have to wait for buffering too often. It sure beats what they used to have, which was no video, or extremely long buffering times.
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