YouTube To Limit Video Quality Around the World for a Month (bloomberg.com) 75
YouTube will reduce the quality of videos around the world starting Tuesday, an effort by the world's most popular video site to ease internet traffic during the coronavirus outbreak. From a report: Over the coming days, viewers will at first see YouTube videos in standard definition, the company said. Users will still be able to watch in high definition if they want, but will have to choose to do so. YouTube, part of Google, is extending a policy it already instituted in Europe, where regulators have asked major streaming services, including Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, to reduce their bandwidth usage.
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It's only the default, you can just change it to 4k manually and upgrade yourself. I did it because a lot of the videos I watch are 60 fps games which is not available at the default and it's unwatchable at 30 fps.
It doesn't reset for the next video either.
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Yeah. I initially had it at 720p60 actually but now it just defaults to the best quality available.
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I know the rest of the world supposedly has faster internet than most of the US, but wouldn't we still have more volume due to sheer numbers compared to other smaller EU countries for instance?
Did they not build their backbone/infrastructure as robust as ours?
Not a troll question, I'm seriously curious.
I've yet to hear anything about any problems in the US to date....
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In many other countries, especially the EU, the backbones are built by government and in normal cases barely able to handle traffic. Sure the IX-es are semi-privatized but that only accounts for traffic between large institutions and businesses.
Private homes, the fiber/copper is generally owned by the government, even if the ISP is privatized, most of the copper/fiber in the streets were run by state companies (think Ma Bell, but the government actually owned and operated it) and are now rented out by semi-
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Disclaimer: I worked for one of the big government entities during the time of it being handed over from government owned to privatization and later had to deal with them working at in Amsterdam, Paris and Brussels' data-centers - the worst, biggest, most expensive companies which under normal market workings should've disappeared a long time ago.
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I live in the EU in what is commonly called a "third world country". The government didn't build squat until very recently, when they realized the lighting poles are filled to the brim with cables, and they created very high speed buried infrastructure, which the ISPs now use for a small yearly fee. As a result, the Internet here is blazing fast, I have had Gigabit Internet since, uh, I can't remember. 2011 I guess. Before that I had 100 Mbit Internet since 2003 or 2004.
Between June 2017 and May 2018 my cou
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I'm on the west coast and everything works normally for me, including access to my east coast servers and youtube.
Skype to Thailand works fine, though apparently Line is lagging.
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If you have a good network connection probably not much has changed, but even before "stay at home" advisories Comcast would already crumple under load in a lot of regions during peak hours every night.
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Perhaps your only mistake was assuming those two things have to be mutually exclusive.
Crappy ISPs, etc. (Score:2)
With the various crappy ISPs and their crappy neighborhood loop systems, it's not often you can watch videos in HD anyway.
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would that require the users to start the same video at pretty much the same time?
(except for streaming/live video)
Re:If we had ipv6 (Score:4, Informative)
No. You are confusing multicast and/or broadcast with the IP version. In any case, the answer is no.
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Re:If we had ipv6 (Score:4, Informative)
Both IPv4 and IPv6 have multicast.
At one point is was viewed as a potential strategy to bring radio/television style video/audio streaming to the internet.
However, multicast IP offered very little advantage over TV/radio, and unicast services that enabled the end user to pick whatever content, whenever they wanted prevailed. It also suffered due to complex strategies to recover lost packets (or else deal with a lossy stream, again a problem that if present would fail to do better than tv/radio).
Peer to peer unicast with significant data caching has a better shot of scaling well (e.g. bittorrent), but by and large this usage has not been seen much in legal streaming, since control is much easier when the distribution is done traditionally.
Nowadays, multicast is pretty much only useful for certain small packets. It is used more in IPv6 than IPv4 (e.g. ARP is broadcast, NDP in IPv6 is multicast) though it still is rarely ever routed and in *most* network segments degrades to broadcast (yes, equipment can and is configured upon occasion to snoop IGMP for IPv4 and MLD for IPv6 to have ethernet pattern follow the IP multicast pattern, but it's relatively rare because it is error prone and not worth it for the small infrequent packets that use it).
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However, multicast IP offered very little advantage over TV/radio, and unicast services that enabled the end user to pick whatever conten....
Oh... Multicast IP most definitely had advantages for video content delivery, and you could still pick what you want to watch/distribute just using the multicast to co-ordinate multiple people wanting to watch the same thing.
One of the Problems with multicast for content delivery is that it is Not what internet service providers want. Unicast allows carriers
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One of the Problems with multicast for content delivery is that it is Not what internet service providers want. Unicast allows carriers to bill for more, because each copy of a stream will use more bandwidth towards the Committed Information rate.... Transit providers WANT you using and therefore purchasing more bandwidth from them, so the economic incentives are aligned AGAINST the providers whose co-operation would be required to co-operate to provide for interdomain multicast for content delivery.
Nonsense. ISPs would just bill everyone individually for the bandwidth, regardless of the savings on their end. ISPs don't want you using more bandwidth, they want to bill you for using more bandwidth. Since they have great freedom to decide what your bandwidth is, they're free to do whatever they want to on their backends.
The problem is, as always, they don't care abut end-user quality. "We're the phone company, we don't have to."
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That makes no sense. The only 'bandwidth' you would save is if multiple devices IN YOUR HOUSE are watching the same mulitcast. And if that is the case, there is this nifty new device called a 'TV' that makes it easy for multiple people to watch the same thing using only one device.
Now, the ISPs would save bandwidth with multicast, but YOU won't. You have it exactly backwards.
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IP multicast is used heavily in finance. It's used for managing market data streams, subscribing to the instrument groups you want. There are simple, robust protocols (e.g. NASDAQ MoldUDP64 [nasdaqtrader.com]) for handling packet sequencing and recovering lost packets. Of course this is all over private networks, not the public internet.
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Multicast would make sense for live events with large numbers of viewers, like the World Cup and the Super Bowl. But there aren't enough of those to make it worth the effort of developing the infrastructure for it.
Meanwhile, content distribution networks have delivered some of the benefits while being more widely applicable. When you watch a movie on Netflix or a video on YouTube, the bits probably aren't coming from their server farms in California. Most of the time they are coming from a content cache at
Re:If we had ipv6 (Score:4)
If we had ipv6 standard
IPv6 is standard. You can already use it, today, to connect to YouTube.
then wouldn't video services be able to send a data stream with multiple recipients
That idea is known as "multicast", and is entirely orthogonal to any discussion about the distinctions between IPv4 and IPv6. IP multicast already exists [wikipedia.org] and works in both IPv4 and IPv6, but it isn't nearly as useful as you think for this sort of thing.
instead of duplicating data streams for each user?
If each viewer is watching the "same video" but starts it at different times of day, views it in different resolutions/framerates, or watches different parts, they still each need their own stream. Multicast is really only useful if everyone is consuming the exact same content at the exact same time, such as when you're dealing with live video. Unfortunately, for recorded videos, which make up the bulk of YouTube viewing, multicast doesn't do you any good whatsoever.
Moreover, even when you're dealing with live streaming, while the stream may not be duplicated in multicast (i.e. there's "one stream"), the data still gets duplicated so that each person receives their own copy (how else do you think that the bits get to their device, after all? they don't magically appear, so of course they're duplicated), so bandwidth consumption won't be significantly affected. Multicast simplifies that process from a logical perspective, but it doesn't change the fact that—under the hood—the data is still getting duplicated just like you'd expect.
The proper way to reduce bandwidth consumption is with a CDN (content delivery network), which is exactly what YouTube is already using. A CDN lets you have a single stream that makes the expensive traversal across most of the Internet, which then branches into multiple streams for each viewer only in the last few miles, thus ensuring that any congestion is kept local, rather than spanning the whole Internet. Theoretically, multicast could do the same, but it wouldn't without a lot of complication because there's nothing forcing each user's connection to go through a local node. Of course, CDNs (unlike multicasting to individual users) also allow content to be buffered for later, meaning that people who view the same content hours apart will only need to make the short hop to the nearest CDN node, rather than the big hop to the canonical location of the file.
(Aside: I seem to recall hearing that YouTube uses multicast to deliver content to their CDN nodes, so I do want to acknowledge that multicast is relevant to YouTube, but their usage—to distribute identical content to nodes within a closed network—is practically the poster child for when you should consider using multicast, whereas the use you're espousing—distributing varied content to devices across an open network—is a case example of when not to use it.)
All of which is to say, YouTube is already built the way it should be to keep bandwidth consumption low across the Internet's central lines. Doesn't change the fact that there's still a lot of people watching YouTube.
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If we had ipv6 standard
IPv6 is standard. You can already use it, today, to connect to YouTube.
Provided that one of the ISPs serving your address offers an IPv6 address. I'm under the impression that many offer only IPv4. Only in July 2019 did ISPs in Myanmar, for example, begin to offer IPv6 service. (source [apnic.net])
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Multicast does give you a big win, because there's only a single copy of the packets going from the server to the switches, and the switches handle routing that to multiple ports. Without multicast, the server needs to send one copy for each client to the switch. Think about the simplest case with a single server and two subscribers connected to one switch. Suppose the server is streaming at 100Mbps to the two clients. Without multicast, it needs to send two 100Mbps streams to the switch, each of which
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Think about the simplest case with a single server and two subscribers connected to one switch.
While your scenario is a good example of the benefits you can achieve with multicast in theory, it doesn't resemble YouTube's actual situation. As I mentioned earlier, multicast is useful in distributing identical content on closed networks, but it isn't so useful in distributing varied content on open networks, which is what YouTube is doing.
(For the moment, I'll set aside that multicast is only useful for live streaming, but I wanted to mention that again since it alone is sufficient reason to not use mul
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Multicast isn't rarely used, it's heavily used in specific industries. Financial services loves multicast for market data distribution. It's vastly more efficient than any of the alternatives. It just isn't useful for video streaming.
I'd be somewhat irked if I paid for youtu.be (Score:3)
Most of my interactions with it are just to listen to music, but they do have services people are paying for.
I guess I'll hold off on making anymore (personal) m3u files with playlists of youtube movies and series.
and what exactly is "standard definition"? 320/480/720/1080? NTSC/PAL?
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It's also worth mention that youtu
The Problem Is the Network Providers (Score:1)
Almost all of them have the same question:
Why should we upgrade our networks to higher capacity? That will cost money and while we're up to our eyeballs in profits, WE AREN'T MAKING ENOUGH MONEY!!!!!
Well it seems like they did that already... (Score:5, Funny)
YouTube will reduce the quality of videos around the world starting Tuesday
From what I've seen the quality of videos on YouTube is already pretty darn low, I don't see how it can go any....
Oh you mean BITRATE. Nevermind.
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That's where a lot of my old videos are, actually.
Google is suffering (Score:2)
Google does not have enough bandwidth to be able to keep up with demand. Plus, I would suspect that they are having a hard time selling advertizing for dingle-dongles when everyone is quarantined and cannot buy them.
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Most likely. Ad payouts to content makers has dropped by more than half (if you were big and getting $10K a month, you'd be getting around $4k as of late). And this is despite the fact Google is now putting up tons of ads - there's at least two ads prior to starting the video, and the ad breaks
Maybe disable your camera when working from home (Score:3)
No need to actually see you during that Zoom meeting.
Every little bit helps.
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Central Scrutinizer (Score:2)
Now...
You must mean "video quality" (Score:3)
I can't imagine the content quality of most of the videos getting any lower.
pornhub (Score:3, Funny)
Pornhub traffic increase [decider.com]
Wait till we see a shortage of lube in countries where male genital mutilation is a norm.
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I was going to comment on Pornhub - after they made themselves free in Italy - but you did far better. They really have Covid-19 porn? Where the participants wear face masks? Wow.
From your link:
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So you've managed to avoid exposure to Rule 34 for this many years?
Also limits upload resolution! (Score:1)
I normally don't double-post to subjects, but something I just read on Twitter was pretty interesting - I follow someone with a Youtube channel, and he was polling on if he should keep uploading - because they are not even letting him upload 1080p quality video, it has to be lower res!
So it's not just downloads that are being limited. It seems like uploads would be affecting traffic far less, I don't know why YouTube would restrict upload quality too but there you are.
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Maybe so that when the videos are viewed, bandwidth usage is reduced by virtue of the lower quality video? Someone mentioned above that they were still able to set video quality to 4K, maybe limiting upload quality is a strategy to prevent that from happening.
Convoluted, I know, but we are talking about Google here.
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Maybe so that when the videos are viewed, bandwidth usage is reduced by virtue of the lower quality video? Someone mentioned above that they were still able to set video quality to 4K
Sure but they could just disable all the higher res switches, and then when restrictions were lifted the video stock itself would once again be able to be seen at full resolution... what YouTube is doing by limiting upload resolution would seem to poison the stock for some large period of time, when people might be creating m
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Youtube slashes the bitrate, so even though you can select 4k, or 1080p, the resulting videos often don't have the super sharp contrast that defines the medium; as if they aren't quite in focus,.At times, there's visible artifacting.
.
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and the up went down by 50-70%
Upload congestion... traffic being suppressed since residential ISPs deliver poor upstream performance.
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i don't understand. i looked at the traffic patterns for most of the major hub and spokes are like only using 50-60% of the norm on average. the traffic just moved from the office business space to the home space. businesses are somewhat symmetric traffic for 20% of the world, and the home is asymmetric, so what's the deal? same down just moved from the office zipcode to the home zipcode, and the up went down by 50-70%
You're contesting the calculus of information theory that the bandwidth use cases of latency averse networks of gaming and video compression for holed up families (and possibly guests/friends, not great) see-sawed with email, Slack-chat-clients, and the worst band-width case, but rare use, of video-conferencing was not designed to provide home use with a greater capacity for delivery? B2B was the first iteration of discovering how to make any use of the web at the office and plateaued for years with OutLoo
I watch in 144p (Score:1)
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144 is also the price of YouTube Premium (Score:2)
Last I checked, downloading videos from YouTube for later offline viewing officially required a $144 per year subscription.
What about the quality of the comments? (Score:2)
Can they increase the quality of the comments? Its pretty bad on there for anything outside of niche subjects.
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What? You mean you don't want to read two idiots arguing back and forth over pointless shit drowning out the guy who genuinely had something interesting to say? What is wrong with you? /s :-)
On a more serious note, it is too bad there is no CONTEXT for thumbs up / thumbs down like there is on /. Reddit has the same problem.
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To the context for Thumbs Down here, there should be a Moderation option for "This poster does not have a clue about what he's writing about" aka "simply false".
I've been using 480p for ages (Score:2)
Looks fine for everything other than programming demos.
Addons (Score:1)
Can they just turn off adds (Score:1)
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Turn off ads? You're funny. They're "essential".
Quality (Score:1)
I have never seen many quality videos on YouTube before this. What is changing?
Atlassian Ads (Score:2)
Good! Can you do something about the fucking Atlassian ads that pop up every couple of minutes. And as an aside, the Manscaping ads too.
[John]
In conformance with... (Score:1)