Broadband

YouTube is synonymous with amateur shaky footage of high school pranks and skateboarding dogs but that might be about to change, at least partially; and that could cause a headache for ISPs.

The famous video site has recently given its content partners, the companies which launch a channel on YouTube, the green light to exceed its previous limit of 10 minutes and upload videos of up to 1GB (roughly the size needed for a feature film at an acceptable level of quality).

Officially YouTube is stating that it is still fundamentally about short video clips and is currently experimenting to see if longer videos work. Clearly it has chosen its professional partners to conduct the live experiment because they have the quality content needed to maintain attention on the web. Ultimately, the video site is keen to determine if it can hold viewer interest long enough to serve more adverts, such as pre-rolls and mid-rolls. These adverts before and during the middle of content can command good advertising rates on the likes of ITV.com and C4.com but are only watched by viewers who know there is good, branded content following. The typical YouTube video is not of sufficient quality to attract this level of advertiser interest because brands do not know what content they are advertising against and viewers cannot be bothered to watch an advert before finding out if a 20 second clip of a cat falling off a table is worth watching.

Whilst the experiment may bring extra revenue opportunities for YouTube it could place a strain on ISP networks which will could find themselves serving up tens of minutes of professional quality video rather than tens of seconds worth of low resolution content from a cut-price camcorder or mobile phone.

ISPs already feeling the strain of traffic from catch-up television services from the BBC, ITV and Channel4, look likely to have to consider the contentious subject of traffic management.

Certainly a spokesman for Virigin Media maintains that it may well force some of its rivals to be more open about how they are dealing with increased pressure on their networks.

“We’re very open about how we deal with pressure on the network and have a link on our home page which shows our policy,” a spokesperson explained.

“We’re very transparent about slowing down connections so that if someone has exceeded 3GB in the busiest time of the day, between 4pm to 9pm, we’ll slow down that connection but then, after that time, it’s back to normal. The slowing down doesn’t last longer than it has to and it’s across all traffic.”

“What we find with some of our rivals is they’ll prioritise email and web surfing and so slow down, say, P2P traffic. They won’t talk openly about it but we know some of them do this and we think it’s unfair to decide for the users what they can and can’t do, that’s why we’re open about it and it’s across the entire connection for a limited amount of time. It only ever affects 5% of our users.”

BT, TalkTalk and Tiscali were all given the opportunity to respond to questions on traffic shaping but none of the three took the opportunity to clarify their policies.

One note of clarity arising from the YouTube decision to trail long form video, though, is what is lying behind its owner, Google, calling for net neutrality through warnings to ISPs it is developing tools to reveal to subscribers if their connections are being ‘throttled’ in any way. The announcement at an American conference came just a couple of days before YouTube announced the long form video switch.

George Ou, a senior consultant for the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (itif.org) made the point immediately after the conference, at which he spoke, why he thought Google had decided to suddenly come out so in favour of net neutrality.

“Make no mistake. Google’s position is based on crippling their video competitors in the IPTV market which is critical to adding competition in the Cable and Satellite TV market which is far more expensive… it has nothing to do with Google idealism.”

Hence by giving web users the tools to find out if their ISP has throttled a connection to, among other things, favour general web traffic over downloading or streaming videos, Google is being seen to be discouraging throttling so its viewers can watch content unhindered over the web with no need for YouTube to take the more expensive option of ensuring consistent quality through broadcasting traditionally over terrestrial, cable or satellite platforms.

Tags: BBC, Channel 4, ITV, Talk Talk, Tiscali, Virgin Media, You Tube