Google upgrades YouTube’s ‘engines’

Serving up billions of hours of video every month would put huge strain on most websites. Social networks such as Twitter and Tumblr still occasionally struggle with much smaller numbers of people viewing just text and pictures. But at YouTube, which delivers more bandwidth-intensive videos, there is no “Fail Whale” – the mascot that Twitter shows when it has collapsed under too many tweets. When Google acquired the scrappy Californian start-up for $1.65 billion in 2006, it plugged YouTube into its own vast server farm to spread the load. In recent months, Google has been investing in new technology to streamline both video uploading and its streaming player, to improve quality for viewers – and increase efficiencies for YouTube. While Google is tight-lipped on whether YouTube has ever turned a profit, these technical changes are commercially significant. Studies show that the faster a video loads, the more likely people are to watch it in full, and to return to the site again soon. It also means they are more likely to watch the ads that increasingly precede the videos.