Why is that Netflix is SO much faster for me than YouTube. I am on a shitty ~5Mbps DSL connection so on YouTube I have to watch 240p (360p on a good day) video to get it to load in anywhere close to real time. On Netflix, my video goes to what looks like 480p-720p quality within the first minute of my watching and the initial 240p-360p quality video loads nearly instantly. Is it just that Netflix has a smaller library and has more caching available for popular content, or are they doing something totally different with video delivery?
The Internet is a really complicated place. There could be any number of reasons Netflix is faster for you than YouTube: your ISP might have better peering with Netflix than Google, or it might have a wider transit pipe to Netflix's preferred transit provider(s) than Google's. Netflix content could indeed be cached closer to your location than YouTube content. With more details I could find out exactly what's happening when you visit YouTube, but I wouldn't be able to share the explanation, and it would probably just be an exercise in frustration for you.
What I can say is that this is definitely something you should let your ISP know about. Tell your ISP that you're unsatisfied with YouTube performance: while some will just brush off the complaint, conscientious ISPs are constantly bringing issues like these to our attention and we have entire teams devoted to making sure all users have a good YouTube experience.
Can't argue with that. When I watch most video, including YouTube (downloaded with youtube-dl), many streaming or download sites, or MythTV recordings, I tend to speed it up to 130-160% of normal; Netflix is the one and only source of video I can't do that with.
Youtube has far shorter videos (5-15 minutes on average), defaults to 480p or less most of the time and the visitor session length is much less than the average Netflix stream.
Netflix is doing 720p / 1080p defaults on most players, 1 hour to who-knows-how-long non-stop sessions (I personally have binge-watched like half a season of TV shows in one sitting occasionally) and gets daily recurring traffic from multiple members per household.
What streaming service falls back to lower bitrates and stays there? YouTube and Netflix are both usually very aggressive at switching back up to the higher bitrates as soon as it detects the connection has recovered to higher speeds.
I get great streaming from netflix, and I find youtube frequently has trouble. Maybe my ISP (Verizon FIOS) is throttling youtube and not netflix, but that would be strange.
1. It actually loads very slow, takes me 5 seconds for the site to become usable on 100Mbit/s and a new fast i7, compared with google.com or hacker news which takes fractions of a second.
2. It is not the first site you go to with a shitty connection as the reason you go there is to watch heavy bandwidth videos.
3. It is essentially a single page app, once loaded, you will stay on the page for the duration of the video and the next video will be played on the same page without reloading.
I dont know the technical issues behind youtube, but I can say, subjectively, that the service as it currently stands sucks from a streaming perspective.
It is constantly buffering/pausing even when all other content, pages and connections work fine.
Anyone with information on why youtube is always so slow care to comment?
I stream daily from netflix, full screen and HQ - so I dont know why Youtube is just so bad by comparison.
Usages are completely different. People look at a few YouTube videos in a given day, usually at low quality for a few minutes. Some people, like me and many people I know, have completely replaced cable and network tv with Netflix. Streaming an episode of Lost at 720p is going to take up a lot of bandwidth.
I'm curious about your last paragraph. Certainly on-demand video is subject to buffering, but the rest of that doesn't seem to be my experience at all. We watch both Netflix and Youtube content at home on multiple clients (e.g. browesr, phones, the now-ancient Netflix app on the TiVo HD...) and while obviously we've seen the occasional network failure I don't think any of them seem to be service-specific.
Basically, watching "premium" 720p+ content on Youtube provides virtually indistinguishable quality and reliability. Is that really not your experience?
I've never noticed any throttling on YouTube (I've had FiOS in Baltimore and now in D.C.). I get a rock solid 140 mbps on Netflix's fast.com, even during primetime. 140/170 on speedtest.com.
It's probably a coincidence, but just this weekend for the first time ever, I noticed my YouTube streaming at visibly lower quality (my provider is Cox). It happened all weekened, intermittently. Nothing else seemed slow, and numerous speed tests (both from official "speed test" sites including Netflix's own Fast.com, and by moving large files between my network and AWS) all showed well over 100Mbps. I don't know if it was being throttled somewhere, Netflix's service was overloaded, or if there was some other weird problem happening on my network that affected Netflix and nothing else. But it was bad enough that my wife who is usually oblivious to audio/video quality actually brought it up.
Unrelated to this link, but youtube is WAY slower than pretty much any other video alternatives.
Note I even use the embed link for the video and have ublock, so it's not the youtube UI boggling it down.
Don't feel like writing more right now, but just felt like saying youtube is terrible in performance to my eyes.
Good. I swear youtube is throttled by Time Warner Cable for me. I stream Netflix, Hulu, etc and never have problems with them. I can confirm that I'm getting my speeds of 20MBit/s down, and yet almost every video on YouTube buffers. If I use youtube-dl to download the video, I can confirm that my actual connection speed is somewhere around 60KB/s. If I then use youtube-dl on my VPS with the same video, I get somewhere between 2MB/s and 8MB/s.
Wait, low bandwidth? Of all the complaints about Google Fiber I've heard (none of which are compelling at all, especially when the alternative is the status quo that literally no consumer enjoys), YouTube speed has never come up. Isn't the big perk of fiber instant video? Or am I misinformed?
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