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.
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.
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.
Not saying that slow Internet doesn’t suck – it does. But when I ever I am stuck on a slow network i download YouTube videos (the command line tool youtube-dl [0] also downloads a lot of other streaming sites). This trades some time for quality: You have to wait while downloading, but you can download whatever quality you have patience for.
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?
Youtube is pretty damn quick, they had their issues for a while but the last two years or so I haven't been able to pin any slowness on them if there was any (providers are another factor though).
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.
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.
Irony of ironies, your best solution might be to use a vpn. My ISP does dramatic traffic shaping at peak hours, and is blocked by prime video as they think it’s a vpn, and I use a popular commercially available vpn provider to sidestep it, and most of their servers seem to work fine with Netflix etc. Additionally, as my ISP is a cell provider, it also means I get automatically served mobile optimised content when streaming, which the VPN also sidesteps - it’s the difference between 800kbps and 50mbps. It’s literally the difference between YouTube at 144p or 4K.
It’s costing me $3 a month - my connection would be pretty much unusable without it.
Right on. I have a pretty good DSL connection (measures 10Mbps down most of the time) but YouTube is almost unusable on my iPad since if there's an HD video, that's the only version you can watch. The speed to YouTube is so poor that the video can't play in real time at all even with a long buffering period.
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.
I used to stream all my videos 144p less than 5 years ago because streaming any higher resulted in a stuttering buffering mess. Youtube was the only streaming service I could watch because most other sites didn't bother with resolutions/bitrates so low. Maybe that's why youtube won out. Much like how whatsapp made it their mission to run on every phone they could get their hands on.
Now we have proper internet I don't but don't for a second doubt that a sizable portion of the internet still suffer from slow speeds, even those living in developed countries.
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