We’ve noticed over the past couple of months that evening YouTube performance is getting increasingly worse. This has been especially true on our mobile devices that we use in our test lab. Between the hours of 5:30PM and 11:00pm EST, YouTube streaming can get quite sporadic and unresponsive. We are currently working on applications for the iPhone and iPod touch platform that utilize the device’s built-in YouTube player, so initially we thought perhaps we had a bug that was causing the problem.
Further investigation and countless hours of internet searching have illustrated to us that this is a widespread issue. In fact, this evening, while showing off our new iPhone application, we were side-by-side streaming content from YouTube on our 27″ iMac development machine and our iPhone 3GS and both would stutter and pause during playback. The desktop version of the stream even waited for around 30 seconds to start playing!
It is currently our belief that all of the new YouTube services that are being offered, when combined with the huge amount of high-definition content being uploaded, is simply taxing the YouTube server farm. We hope to see resolution to this soon – our latest apps depend on it 😉
In the meantime – a quick solution that someone has suggested to us (not ideal, but it works) is to switch your iPhone wireless off if you’re going to be streaming during these hours until this problem is resolved. When you switch wireless off, the iPhone YouTube player will automatically stream the lower bandwidth h.264 or MP4 video streams which are lighter weight and do not seem to be as affected by these issues.
