This is just one of the many fights surrounding net neutrality.<p>We desperately need to break up ISP monopolies and enact strict net neutrality regulation and bandwidth (even latency/routing) guarantees. The idea that a single ISP is in a position to charge both YouTube <i>and</i> its customers is bizarre. By any basic reasoning, an ISP that doesn't enable access to YouTube should be out of customers within a few months. That this doesn't happen is testament to the broken market surrounding internet access, and a bad sign for the fights that await us.<p>(Google needs to start naming and shaming the ISPs that do not want to peer with them on reasonable conditions or with sufficient capacity when they detect bad performance on YouTube. They have been doing this locally, e.g. they delisted french news sites from Google News when these lobbied for protectionist laws, and they have been stating the parties that forbid them from showing copyrighted content, e.g. the GEMA in Germany.)
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.
Step one here is transparency. Before we impose new mechanisms by legislating, we should allow detailed study of the ones that are in place. To do that we may need legislation that states simply: All such peering agreements, including all of the technical and financial terms, shall be filed as public documents with the FCC at least 7 days prior to taking effect.<p>This accomplishes two things: It allows third-party analysis, and it provides early warning of change to affected parties.
If you have a Mac, try a free program called YouView. Google YouView Mac. It gives you YouTube experience, but uses the MP4 files YouTube hosts for the mobile platforms. I never have a problem with YouView. Some times it's slow, but at least you can download the entire movie before watching. Also, it uses a lot less resources, 5-10% CPU vs 30%+ if played via browser. This means better battery life.<p>I think something like that must exist for windows and Linux, but I could not find anything free.
The internet used to be ran by engineers. Now it's ran by suits ...<p>The former does what needs to be done, and all pitch in to move traffic. Suits on the other hand only see $$$.<p>As for the suits: either your are overselling your bandwidth and you don't have enough money to make the necessary changes REGARDLESS of where the traffic is going/coming from. Or your just being greedy !<p>To fight this, I think it's best to get review ISP by their real speed. Then getting this information out to the public. So people can select the best ISP, and natural selection of the fittest(fairest ISP) will occur.
The reality is that major ISPs like Verizon and Comcast want Netflix to DIE because it is a major competitor of theirs. How many people have cut their cable TV service because Netflix is "good enough?"<p>So Verizon and Comcast can compete with Netflix, or they can attempt to cut off their knees.<p>"Nice streaming service you got there. Be a shame if it was so slow your users got frustrated and cancelled their service."<p>This is why Verizon and Comcast don't take Netflix up on their offer to provide caching servers, create peering agreements and take other actions that actually decrease the ISP's cost. Because <i>Verizon and Comcast want Netflix DEAD</i>.
Content is King. Youtube should be copying the model of local TV stations. Charge the cable companies for the privilege of accessing content. It shouldn't be reversed.
So its basically ISPs acting as CDNs, infact the best one money can buy.<p>Does this mean no one will every be a true competitor to Youtube or match its performance unless they pay all the local ISPs?
This peering issue has affected me a lot. I watch a lot of gaming streams online and during peek hours Twitch.tv has becomes unusable. During a major tournament this is very unfortunate. Another example of this peering dispute affecting me is with the game League of Legends.<p>Almost everyone who is on Comcast (myself included) during peek times experiences lag that makes the game unplayable. Your character "skates" along the map and usually when it buffers and catches up to you you'll find yourself dead. My friends and I got together to play over the weekend and ended up having to stop due to the lag.<p>Heres a thread where the guys at Riot are trying to identify the issue. It wasn't until 7/22 that they identified the problem everyone has been having was due to a peering dispute between Verizon and other vendors. To fix the problem they are having to make changes with their provider to route traffic to bypass problematic junctions.<p><a href="http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=3521364" rel="nofollow">http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=3521364</a><p>Its been very eye opening to me. I have a 50mb connection and I always thought that as long as I had a faster connection I wouldn't have lag issues. It was disappointing to learn that regardless of your connection you can still be throttled by ISPs and their vendors.
I thought this idea was actually quite good, although sometimes the buffering issue is there.
About 50% of videos I've watched, I've tuned of within 1 minute because it wasn't what I expected. The old system would have buffered about 10 minutes worth by then. The new system only buffers about 15 seconds. This is a huge bandwidth saving when you think of it on a mass scale.
Just the other day I had a non-technical friend ask me if upgrading his 50Mb connection to 75 as suggested by Verizon would get rid of his YouTube buffering problems.<p>I wonder how prevalent and successful such fraudulent upselling is?
Youtube has a very poor connection around my area in Canada. Video connections are unreliable, unexpectedly dropping or just being slow. Slower than the Kbps of the video I'm trying to watch.<p>For youtube's client side player this is completely intolerable. Which is why you don't depend on youtube's clientside player for anything. Use SMplayers downloader, or youtube-dl, or videodownloadhelper. These make use of more dependable protocols for downloading the video, and they will download 100% of the video.<p>You can buffer several videos up and watch effectively.<p>My user experience is so much better than what people experience through official channels. How can that be? I hacked my user experience together with bits of string and duct tape. Why should my experience be so miserable on official channels when so many manhours have supposedly went into making that experience the best?<p>Should you really be losing out to bits of string and duct tape?<p>What the ISP's are doing to youtube isn't fair, but the ISP's are clearly not the only ones at fault.
You should try to stream live content from twitch.tv. Pretty much everyone complains about how bad their service is, and twitch has been very clear that they're doing everything they can but that it mostly comes down to these deals with the big Internet infrastructure guys.
Youtube was almost unwatchable on my 50/30 FiOS till I did this <a href="http://mitchribar.com/2013/02/how-to-stop-youtube-sucking-windows-guide/" rel="nofollow">http://mitchribar.com/2013/02/how-to-stop-youtube-sucking-wi...</a>. This completely transformed my youtube experience to one that's fine compared to waiting 10 minutes for a 1 minute 240p video to buffer enough I could watch it all the way through.<p>Now the only problems I have are with the semi-broken new player, fast forwards and rewinds are often broken, full screen doesn't always full screen etc.
As a temporary workaround I access YouTube over an IPv6 tunnel through Hurricane Electric. Since I set it up almost two years ago I have had no issues with YouTube. The only downside has been the IRS's quarterly tax site which seems to be misconfigured for IPv6 access but works if r over IPv4 (/etc/hosts FTW).
Sounds like mirroring and ftp servers (or even bittorrent) would work just fine for distributing copyright-cleared video. Indeed that's how I remember it being done before YouTube and Netflix existed.<p>Today, with the explosion of online video, the copyright-clearance step could be administered by companies (as it already is, e.g., YouTube), but the servers providing distribution to the users at the network edge do not have to be run by companies.<p>1. Recall that storage is quite inexpensive and users are today quite capable of providing their own at home or on-the-go storage for terabytes or gigabytes of video.<p>2. Recall the "content-centric" networking idea Van Jacobsen has presented to Googlers. Does it really matter where the user gets the content? No. What is important is that it is authentic (and copyright-cleared).
Here I was cursing my ISP for ridiculous connection but I should have been cursing them for entirely different reasons! What is the use of taking costly high speed plans when the sites that require high speed (youtube, other video streaming) are still going to be slow?
There was a similar discussion on HN a few weeks ago regarding a similar issue about ISPs buffering the CDN (I think).<p>I dug up a link that I saved:<p><a href="http://mitchribar.com/2013/02/time-warner-cable-sucks-for-youtube-twitchtv/" rel="nofollow">http://mitchribar.com/2013/02/time-warner-cable-sucks-for-yo...</a><p>Here is the fix:<p><pre><code> sudo ipfw add reject src-ip 173.194.55.0/24 in
sudo ipfw add reject src-ip 206.111.0.0/16 in</code></pre>
This article just brought a whole new meaning to Google Fibre. I think Google is seriously considering becoming an ISP which would make a lot of sense seeing as how they make up 25% of North America's traffic already[1].<p>1 - <a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/07/google-internet-traffic/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/07/google-internet...</a>
I watch <a href="http://www.internethealthreport.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.internethealthreport.com</a> out of interest - it shows just how clearly the peering is skewed for US tier 1s.
Given this discussion, what's the best resource for choosing a new ISP? I'm moving to SF in a week and I want to get a really nice connection for my apartment?
I remember the glory days when YouTube would buffer the whole video from where you started, at a very uniform speed. If you wanted to jump to somewhere in the video and it was buffered, there was no rebuffering.<p>ISP's or not, it is infuriating for me as a user to see a website get <i>significantly worse</i> as it gets bigger and bigger.