What YouTube is Doing
We want to make the web a faster place for everyone. Here's what we're doing.
- With Adaptive Bitrate, we break down each video into multiple segments (typically
just a few seconds long) for each available video quality.
- YouTube detects how smoothly a video is playing and adjusts the quality to
account for temporary fluctuations in bandwidth or congestion. This can amount to a
large number of decisions that must be made in real time to find how to play a single
video.
- For example, if you walk away from your Wi-Fi router, the video
might switch from 720p down to 480p as the signal becomes weaker.
- We've invested billions of dollars in the bandwidth and infrastructure necessary
to bring our services as close to your Internet Service Provider's (ISP) front door
as possible, for free.
- We have an open peering policy for our internal network, which means we'll
directly interconnect with any ISP who can reach our 70 points of presence worldwide
without charge.
- We often deploy servers within your ISP's network, vastly reducing the distance
the video has to travel and minimizing the chance for congestion.
- We continuously scale our infrastructure and run advanced traffic-control
algorithms that re-route your traffic quickly in the event of outages, capacity
constraints, or degraded performance.
- Like everyone else, we compress video data so it can be efficiently transmitted
across the Internet.
- At YouTube, we work tirelessly on increasing the streaming quality of the video
that can be transmitted in as little data as possible, optimizing existing
compression technology and championing new approaches.
- We're developing new video formats like WebM to give you even higher
definition while requiring less bandwidth.