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

While it may be true that there are some outstanding ISP issues that lead to slow internet, I think the more pressing issue is the behaviour of the new(ish) youtube player acting erratic. For instance, you cannot fully load a video anymore, it will only load a portion as you continue watching. If you wish to rewind the video, for some reason youtube will want you to rebuffer the entire from where you have rewinded to. This is terrible when dealing with slow connections. I have found that since youtube has implemented three specific things, 1) new player, 2) changing of related videos, 3) google account requirements, the user experience has gone way down hill.

Their player has always been abysmal, from day one. I've noticed a lot of A/B testing for the player recently, as well, and some of the things they're trying out just don't even begin to make sense. It is turning the simple act of watching a video into a legitimately irritating experience.

There seems to be quite a few issues with video resolution. I had one video suddenly switch from 1080p full-screen down to 144p[1] in full-screen...

[1] - Apparently they added this quite recently http://www.ghacks.net/2013/04/06/youtube-introduces-ultra-lo...

Not buffering the entire video has happened for a long, long time. Years. There's various browser extensions out there that can help you if you want them. The resolution selection is still weird, though, and jumping forward or backward to what look like buffered times is definitely annoying.

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.

For things like YouTube, that could work, but if Netflix tried to do something like that the cable compaines would just start their own services for their customers instead (a la Verizon's Redbox Instant)