YouTube is further flexing its parent company’s infrastructure to speed up video uploads.
With all the hooplah of Mobile World Conference, this piece managed to fly past our radar a bit. The Wall Street Journal has reported that YouTube has altered their strategy for increasing video upload speed.
Previously YouTube engineers had focused on trying to squeeze more speed out of individual servers by utilizing multi-threading and other parallel processing techniques.However, breaking apart the video into multiple pieces and assigning the encoding job across hundreds if not thousands of computers has shown a much bigger speed increase.
YouTube expects that a video that in 2010 took over seven minutes to upload and go live will now take under three and a half for the same task. This is possible because of Google’s extremely low latency and robust cloud infrastructure, which Google invests billions in each year to continue improving speed and efficiency.
This improvement is somewhat overdue, as YouTube is now facing fierce competition from sites like Vimeo. YouTube does continue to dominate in the space though, and faster uploading will not only make consumers happy, but also Hollywood studios aiming to use the site to promote premium content.
(via the WSJ)