YouTube Help

The YouTube video speed history shows the past video speeds of YouTube videos you watched from your location (your current browser at your current IP address). It also shows aggregate video speed by other users in your city, state, country, and worldwide.

To view your YouTube video speed history, right-click on any YouTube video and select Take speed test.

Video speed is an important part of your viewing experience since it determines the amount of time you need to wait before you can start watching a video. It is also an important factor in determining the quality of the video you can watch. By making the video speed history data available, we hope to better inform you of speed issues as they relate to your viewing experience, and give you the ability to compare your speed numbers with other users in your region.

The speed numbers are for YouTube video traffic only.

There are many factors that affect the video speed. Some of the factors that impact the video speed are the the Internet Service Provider you are using, the distance from your computer to Google servers, the computer you are using, other devices in your network such as other computers and Internet connected appliances. etc.

We infer the location of the request by mapping the IP address that is sent to our video servers. The location is only an approximation because our mapping is itself a limited resolution approximation and also because Internet Service Providers may internally change the IP address that is sent to our video servers.

"Your location" means your current browser at your current IP address.

No. We do not support this currently.

On weekends, more users watch online videos from home which typically have slower connection speeds than at work. This is one reason for the drop in video speed during the weekends.

The video speed database is updated once a day.

Provide feedback for the team here.

The video speed depends on a variety of different factors including the Internet Service Provider you are using, the distance from your computer to Google servers, the computer you are using, other devices in your network such as other computer and Internet connected appliances. etc.

We may not have any recent data for your IP address and your browser (identified by a cookie). Additionally, if your Internet Service Provider changes the Internet address you are using regularly, we will likely not show information for you. Note that using a different browser, using a different computer, clearing your browser's cookies, or changing how you are connected to the Internet will also have the effect of changing which speed information you see. Below are the rules used for showing the average video speed and average speed history.

Average Video Speed
We only show you the daily average video speed your browser has had when connecting from the same IP address in the past, provided that you've watched videos on YouTube in the past 30 days from the same browser (see "You" in the bar graph).

Average Video Speed History
We show you the daily average video speed history over the past month, if you've had at least 4 days of viewing history in the past 30 days (see "Your Current Location" in the line graph).

We first compute the bandwidth of almost every YouTube video played by considering the amount of data sent to and acknowledged by the user's machine in a given time period. Small video responses are excluded as they can add noise to our bandwidth calculation. This bandwidth estimate of every video played is associated with a VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE cookie and with the IP address that requested the video, but NOT with a YouTube user name.

For the daily speed number as shown in the YouTube speed page we average the bandwidth for all videos played from a given cookie and IP address across the course of the day. If a single laptop user uses multiple network connections and watches videos regularly from these, they could see different speed measurements and historical data based on which connection they are using.

The measurements for an Internet Service Provider (ISP) are computed by averaging the daily averages of all users (again based on VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE cookie) who use the same ISP and are in the same geographic region. The ISP speed number will be an average of all users across all types of Internet connectivity and service plans offered by the ISP.

No.

No.