Never thought I’d see the day Google would run out of bandwidth.

Everyone knows Youtube. The fact that you could easily share your videos with the world helps, but the real reason people keep coming back is that it offered an instant play, allowing you to start watching a video instantly, having the servers stream the rest of the content to you as you play. Even though the video quality is lacking at times, it’s the instant gratification, ease of use and the fact that you can embed the videos with ease into your own site that makes Youtube the popular site it is today.

To do the whole stream data with instant play, you need more available bandwidth then the bandwidth it takes to play the video. As soon as the available bandwidth drops below the bit rate required playing the video, your video stops and you get the old ‘buffering’ effect.

As explained before, one of the reasons Youtube is so big is ease of use without irritation. Google would be smart to pick up on this and make sure that, even though they dish out massive amounts of bandwidth, they have all the bandwidth that the site requires to play without downtime due to buffering. If they don’t, they might want to just kill of the site and save millions on monthly bandwidth fees since it will go downhill fast if users are no longer happy.