Youtube: Sex,lies and videotapes

4511769 7432704C55 OIt has been months now since youtube announced that they will increase video bit rate but that hasn’t yet happened. I was just browsing some videos on youtube (movie trailers mostly) to see if the videos are now in better quality. I haven’t noticed much of a difference. I am sure that Internet nowadays is capable of streaming higher quality video material so I don’t quite understand as for why YouTube is hesitating on improving the system? I was really looking forward to streaming high quality videos on my computer, the Wii and on iPod, but it does not look promising so far? Other youtube type websites like Daily Motion are much more advanced when it comes to the video quality but they are still less popular with users. YouTube, what the heck are you waiting for?

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This entry was posted on March 18, 2008 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Internet, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Youtube: Sex,lies and videotapes”

  1. Rob C Says:
    May 8, 2008 at 5:10 pm

    It’s popularity is likely to be the reason - with millions of users across the globe, even a small increase in bitrate would require an astronomical increase in bandwidth, which would mean an equally astronomical cost to pay for it. To give you an idea here is a small extract from wikipedia

    “In January 2008 alone, nearly 79 million users watched over 3 billion videos on YouTube.”

    and even more interestingly..

    “[4]

    In August 2006, The Wall Street Journal published an article revealing that YouTube was hosting about 6.1 million videos (requiring about 45 terabytes of storage space), and had about 500,000 user accounts.[5] As of April 9, 2008, a YouTube search returns about 83.4 million videos and 3.75 million user channels.[6][7]

    YouTube is currently not profitable, with its revenues being noted as “immaterial” by Google in a regulatory filing.[4] Its bandwidth costs are estimated at approximately $1 million a day.[4] It is estimated that in 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000. [8]”

    $1m a day for bandwidth is a LOT of money (pretty obvious :p) so I’m sure they wouldn’t want to increase that already immense figure just for the sake of SLIGHTLY better quality videos, when the majority of it’s users seem to be happy with it as it is, and it is not making them any money!

    Hope this helps,
    Rob

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