YouTube To Offer Subscription Service This Week
jfruh writes "According to an email from a Google spokesman, YouTube will be offering a $1.99/month subscription service as early as this week. This service will 'bring even more great content to YouTube for our users to enjoy and provide our creators with another vehicle to generate revenue from their content,' though there was no indication of what content will be offered through the service exactly. YouTube has offered rentals for specific videos before but this is the first time the service would go head-to-head with subscription services like Netflix."
I think that Google first proved that they are capable of delivering pretty 1080p video without stuttering, while leaving you the option for 720p if your internet or playback device can't handle 1080p. We'll see what content they will be offering, but I'm pretty sure about one thing: People are comfortable with Youtube as a video delivery system. You can bet that there will be living room devices that will seamlessly treat your subscribed Youtube channels as regular TV channels. Hopefully, future Youtube Android apps will allow you to pre-buffer the premium content so that you can watch it even when you don't have a good connection, for example, on a bus. If some of their subscriptions were things like Discovery Channel, ESPN and Comedy Central, how many people would drop their cable TV altogether? If these channels were on premium Youtube, the living room experience of watching them would be undiminished compared to cable TV, and all kinds of new options for VOD and watching on portable devices would open up. If Google does this right, the only people that will continue subscribing to cable TV will be luddites who can't be bothered to make Youtube work in their living room.
You're just one step closer to the dystopian future of the all-despising baby skull: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2490
That nonsense has been debunked numerous times. Reddit latched on to the "workaround", but if you actually read the full thread -- not skim it -- you will find intelligent network-savvy folks commenting on its idiocy. The person who came up with this "workaround" doesn't understand things like DNS load balancing, anycast, and other methodologies Youtube deploys (including back-end stuff) to accomplish load balancing. You might also be surprised to know Youtube's Flash applet (not sure about the HTML 5 stuff) has rate-limiting implemented in it as well (really, it does).
Here are two forums threads I've been involved with now where in both cases asking people to step up to the plate and provide hard proof (specifically of TWC implementing some kind of throttling) resulted in them admitting the supposed "workaround" doesn't work at all, not to mention contains references to netblocks that have nothing to do with Youtube, and netblocks of the wrong size (based on ARIN WHOIS, rather than what's advertised on the Internet via BGP):
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r28102912-Heads-up-guys.new-trick-to-eliminate-Youtube-throttling-
http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?threads/youtube-loading-issues-possible-solution.68493/
I wish that Mitch Ribar guy would take down that blog post already.
It's probably your ISP's fault. I know my ISP, Virgin Media, breaks Youtube.
What tends to happen is that the ISP notices a lot of traffic coming from YouTube. So they call up Google and get some caching servers installed inside their network just to handle YouTube video. All YouTube traffic is intercepted and redirected to these caches and for about five minutes all is well. Then YouTube traffic doubles in a year but the ISP makes no effort to upgrade its caches and everything grinds to a halt.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yeah, exactly. He wants to pay for a service. LOL! What an idiot. AMIRITE?
Mind elaborating on this and how it relates to youtube vids?