Why YouTube buffers: The secret deals that make and break online video

That said, I pay my ISP for bandwidth and service. It's bullshit if they refuse free installation of caching servers which improves my service and frees up upstream bandwidth for others.

why is this bizarre?

Besides, one nitpick: the Google News story was in Belgium, not in France.

I have never had any of the problems described in the article. I live in the UK, and use a small ISP that prides itself on giving me a high quality service. And I get it.

Edit: downvoting? Really? If you disagree, then why not provide an actual explanation of why fixing the monopolies won't fix this problem on its own in a reply?

I don't think the US government (or those of its several states) is competent enough to regulate the complex interconnections between networks. I predict that the major ISPs will be able to find new tools to degrade network conditions faster than regulators will be able to sanction them for it, should the government choose to go after this fight at all: the essential abandonment of the wholesale provisions of the Telecommunication Act of 1996 ended the possibility of reasonable widespread competition for broadband: lack of choices is why this is a problem in the first place.

Some even go a step further, inspecting unencrypted HTTP traffic and replacing referrer IDs and such on advertisement links (e.g. links to Amazon).

Your solution is to have the government, through legislation, control how bandwidth is rationed? Yes, by all means, instead of degraded YouTube performance, let's just cut everyone's bandwidth across the board to some idiotic bandwidth guarantee. As if the government would somehow magically be able to better ration bandwidth than the companies that, you know, actually provide it.

A better solution might be to get rid of regulations and try to lower the barriers to entry, so that it's easier for smaller startups to get into the same space as the ISP's. "But limited infrastructure, blah blah, whaa whaa." Shut it.

Google shouldn't be the only company with the ability to create new infrastructure (like inflatables). But since regulation around internet infrastructure has to be micro-managed by so many levels of government, it only makes things harder for the non-Googles.

I walked away from the article much more skeptical of the value of net neutrality rules.

Are you going to have a law that requires someone maintain all their equipment? How will you know what's "maintained enough?" What about the companies that didn't deploy as much capacity as service providers wanted? How will you eliminate the appearance of favoritism in regulators enforcing something so vague?

That said, I'm all for breaking up monopolies and punishing collusion though, that seems like an easier fix, something we have more experience enforcing.

Making a general video host is so expensive and complicated that we may have to just resign to use YouTube for at least some more years... but it's easily one of the worst user experiences regarding online videos.

Netflix does this too and it drives me nuts, especially when I'm watching something in HD because it automatically switches to low definition for a few seconds until the high definition version is loaded.

But the ISP makes a gigantic difference. I have the benefit of a great ISP (smallish in size, no surprise) and seeing all the youtube jokes about ads always working but not the videos themselves made me somewhat puzzled, as the very few times a video doesn't stream it's just as likely to be the ad that pauses as the main video, and that's super annoying because you can't skip ahead in an ad like you can the main video. I figured that other ISPs were worse, but there must be some exaggeration going on for comedic effect.

Then recently I was at my parent's house for a while, where they are on Time Warner. I really had no idea how unusable it could be. Constant pausing of video for loading every 20 seconds or so, waiting at the very beginning of almost every video, not knowing if a video was loading or there was some kind of error and the page needed to be refreshed.

I'm really used to checking youtube for how to do basic household tasks. Often you'll have to go through two or three to find a good video on a subject. You can't do that at all in that environment, as the waiting is just too much. I'd switch to 240p just to get the gist of a video to make sure I wanted to watch it, so definitely forget any movies you want to see with good quality video. I would queue up videos so at least something was buffered, which meant you have to plan ahead on what you want to watch, totally changing how you use the site.

It's really like a totally different product. I think of youtube as the wikipedia of home repair and cooking (or maybe more ehow or whatever, but the point is that it has an expert video for everything) and I also use it for constant mindless browsing and watching interesting talk after interesting talk, quickly deciding if something is worth watching within 30 seconds by scrubbing around in the video a few times. You can't use it for either of those things, and the desire to pull out your hair while waiting for anything else taints any other use, too.

If I was on that Time Warner connection, I wouldn't be making jokes about how ads always seem to buffer just fine, I would be completely puzzled how other people would think that Youtube was in any way worth using. It really felt like stepping back to dialup.

My connection isn't especially fast, but maybe my ISP does the local CDN thing. People should try it out, because I suspect the transition the other way would be closer to a religious experience, or like stepping out of a time machine. Meanwhile Googlers working on the youtube player might want to all get a Time Warner connection, as maybe designing for that (as opposed to more specific bandwidth or latency limitations) might make for a better player for the many suffering people out there.

It replaces the YouTube player with the standard html5 video player. This alone made my experience on YouTube way better. My connection is slow, so many times I'll just open a YouTube video in a background tab, and leave it loading for a while. With this, I can just preload the whole video. And seeking doesn't make the video reload.

A side bonus, also, is that every video will use the html5 player, so making flash useless on YouTube (one of the few sites that make me keep flash installed). It will also remove the ads, so it might not be your thing for moral/ethical reasons.

I noticed that they introduced this feature around the same time they removed the right-click option to stop downloading the video.

Moreover, the little that is prebuffered seems to behave oddly, you skip forward well within the indicated area that have been buffered, yet the player seems to reset and start re-downloading that part -> unueably slow.

It helped a lot, especially when YT was slow as hell on Free in France.

Unfortunately it doesn't measure real content providers so it may not detect peering problems.

Once net neutrality is broken, the market is also broken.

I'm sure you must have a decent ISP somewhere down in the states. If not, perhaps you just need to wait for google to do it.

I had a pathetic experience with an ISP "reselling" Bell's DSL service. The ISP's name is Distributel. YouTube would not, at "peak times" (6pm - 9pm on weekdays, most times on weekends), work at 1080. The download speed forced you to wait for the entire clip to pre-buffer before it would be possible to play it.

What was frustrating was that opening an SSH proxy to a US server (hosted at Linode) and going through that proxy would allow you to watch 1080 clips with plenty of pre-buffering headroom. I tried to explain this to tech support (with bandwidth measurements, etc) to no avail.

I finally switched over to TekSavvy who have always had their shit down. They truly rock (the tech support is amazing).

YouTube usually works quite well on my network (TimeWarner Cable in SE Wisconsin, US), but occasionally I'll be completely unable to receive HD streams of certain content, so I have to select 480/320p to buffer the video at all.