Videos May Clog the Internet

Our friends at Google are now warning that the increasing amount of videos available on the Net, may someday soon clog the Internet and slow it down to a crawl. Services such as YouTube, which is owned by Google, are proving tricky for Internet providers to deal with and new video developments could create even more problems.

"The web infrastructure - and even Google's - doesn't scale," said Vincent Dureau, Google's head of TV technology. "It's not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect."

Surfers around the world already use sites such as YouTube to watch videos online, but video file sharing services are increasing pressure on the Internet's capacity. More and more companies are popping up on line offering free (and illegal) movies for downloading. Just this week, Wal-Mart went on-line with its movie download site...and I already told you about being able to watch movies on the NetFlix's web site...and there are many more sites that we haven't even mentioned here. Movie downloads take up a lot of bandwidth, and although the amount of available bandwidth is huge, it is not limitless.

One of the unwitting culprits is BitTorrent, a technology already used by millions of people to obtain high-quality video over the net. And while BitTorrent is controversial because many people use it to download movies illegally, the system's creators are expected to launch a legitimate movie download site in conjunction with some major studios.

And despite the relatively small number of users, research indicates that systems such as BitTorrent are already responsible for more than 50% of all Internet traffic! Some executives fear that without improvements and additions to the available bandwidth, video download services could clog up the Internet and cause online gridlock.

If you are not familiar with it, BitTorrent is revolutionary because it makes downloading faster than any of the traditional methods; perfect for large files such as video. Instead of allowing people to swap complete items, such as music tracks or entire TV series, it breaks each piece of information into tiny fragments.

The technology then finds a multiple number of sources which already have the files and downloads all the separate fragments to your computer simultaneously. The results are then reassembled into the finished article so that you can watch the video on your machine. The system works well because it plays on one of the fundamental tenets of the Internet - that people are able to download files much faster than they can put files onto it.

But BitTorrent cannot be used to watch videos on the Net at places like YouTube and Netflix and download sites like Wal-Mart are at one location...so again BitTorrent cannot be used. This increase of videos on the Net and the resulting clogging of the Internet pipes is a story that will begin unfolding sooner rather than later and bears watching.