It often is now the case in the US. A couple years of go YouTube's streaming was pretty much flawless. I don't think they've managed to keep up with demand.
> I don't think they've managed to keep up with demand.
They, or our ISP overlords, perhaps.
It's definitely the case for Germany. It seems to depend on the particular video, though. I had some videos not loading at all at 360p, while others loaded perfectly fine at 720p.
Yeah I've found the same thing. It must depend on something back end, like the encoding used when the file was uploaded, or whether the servers holding that particular file are busy at the time. It's very frustrating.
I'm in England with ~15mbps down, 1mbps up, never noticed any slow down with Youtube. I can't recall ever not being able to stream without buffering, always been good for me.
I'm in the US on a fiber connection and I constantly wait for buffering. It's only gotten worse over the past year.
I'm in Virginia, and this happened all the time to me while I was on Comcast, but since switching to another ISP, I never encountered this problem.