YouTube is stepping up the fight against ISPs that are not delivering well enough speeds for subscribers to stream videos properly. Whenever a user is having problems with buffering or low quality videos, YouTube will now notify users that the problem may lie with their ISP.
Users are required to click a button that reads, "Experiencing interruptions?" From there, users will be brought to a separate page showing the service quality of the ISP, and other ISPs within the vicinity. Such a move could force Internet Service Providers to improve performance, as it is likely that many users would not think twice about jumping ship over slow and low quality YouTube performance.
A YouTube representative claims that this new measure is not designed to shame ISPs, but to educate users on why videos may take some time to load. However, we bet the service providers are not looking at from the same perspective.
Not too long ago, YouTube released a video quality report designed to let users know why a low quality stream is not the fault of YouTube, so this move is not surprising.
Furthermore, what YouTube is doing is quite similar to the stunt Netflix pulled when it named and shamed Verizon Wireless for slow speeds. However, that didn't go as planned for Netflix, as Verizon no sooner requested the company to cease and desist from playing the blame game, or else the lawyers would get involved.
YouTube shouldn't come across the same problems as Netflix, as its implementation is more subtle. In addition, YouTube's way of doing things actually gives users raw data, while Netflix gave nothing but a name and a lot of talks.
The question though, is how useful is the data? We can't tell for sure since the graphs are not labeled with numerical values so the only thing users can do at this point is figure out which time of a particular day is best for streaming, and also to tell which ISP is doing better within the vicinity.
Time will tell if ISPs will attack Google over this, as it appears to be educating users a great deal.
