By: iPadfanzz staff on March 21, 2013
YouTube is now serving billion of users per month. Of course, this requires massive bandwidth. But the type and energy costs of the infrastructure are closely guarded trade secrets of Google as that is how they gain a competitive advantage.
As it is known TouTube is a video hosting website that allows users to upload videos to the site and allowing visitors to search and watch videos anytime they want at no cost. A search function allows visitors to search videos by keywords or topics ranging from the David Letterman Show to hilarious home video clips. YouTube was among the first site to offer videos in streaming media format. That meant that users don’t have to wait for the video to download to happen before watching the video. Instead, the media is sent in a continuous stream and is played as it arrives. This significantly reduced the waiting time and made the entire YouTube experience a smooth and enjoyable one.
The download speed has always been the key challenge for the company as studies showed that the faster a video loads, the more likely people are to watch it in full, and to return to the site again soon. It also means they are more likely to watch the ads that increasingly precede the videos.
As per reports, an average of 72 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute and as people use better cameras, the resource demands are increased.
The Internet giant has been testing a new technology to streamline both video uploading and its streaming player, to improve quality for viewers – and increase efficiencies for YouTube. It works like this: whenever a user uploads a video file on YouTube, it is “transcoded” into a YouTube-friendly video format that can play on any device, using a system called “pipelining”, meaning it begins processing even before the initial file upload is complete.
Through an internal project known as Sliced Bread, the team has worked to eliminate the dreaded rotating circle that appears when videos stall. The company says the incoming information will be chopped into bits, sending each one to different clusters of machines. Then you have to take all these pieces back and create one video, it said.
Google is putting a lot of emphasis on the new technology for the simple reason: “When the spinner appears, users disappear.” But it also feels that the effort will also close the performance gap with the chief rival to streaming video: traditional television.
Researchers at Akamai and University of Massachusetts found that people will start abandoning a video if it takes more than two seconds to load - and if the video crashes, odds climb they won't come back that week.
Given that YouTube streams 4 billion videos every month, it becomes all the more important for the company to plug the loopholes in order to increase the total time spent on the site. That, in turn, will mean more eyeballs for advertising.
Right now a bold leap is also required by the company given that today a lot of users are uploading videos through cameras capable of capturing high-definition videos. Right now Right now, you can pick the quality you'd like to use for videos on YouTube, selecting anything from 240p, which is very low definition, to 1080p, considered full HD (you can occasionally even choose "Ultra HD 4K" on desktops).
In addition, the company has paid a lot of attention to improve the fluidity of the video playing on the website, as it now has a service which can dynamically switch between file chunks of various qualities from one frame to the next, depending on the strength of the connection at any moment.
Ever since the company switched to Sliced Bread for desktops last April, total buffering time on the site has fallen by 20 percent. That means the "spinner" is an increasingly rare sight on computers connected to broadband. It also means users watch millions of hours more video each month.
