As I briefly mentioned before, streaming video has been the main victim of my recent network problems. It’s been an interesting opportunity to examine just how the different services are handling it:
YouTube: Videos load more slowly than usual, and I can’t start watching them right away. Given enough time, though, it does eventually load the whole thing, so I just have to pause it and wait until a decent amount is preloaded. A.
Google Video: Likewise, it’s slow to load but eventually gets there, though a bit slower overall than YouTube, I think. It just suffers its usual usability and quality problems, being the abandoned orphan of Google’s video services. A-.
Viddler: The loading bar sometimes stops and gives up in the middle of a video, causing playback to stop when it gets there. You can get it started again by clicking near that spot on the bar, though, and skipping around like that is fairly robust in general, so there’s at least a workaround. B-.
Dailymotion: Unfortunately, the loading bar stops frequently here, and seeking around its progress bar isn’t nearly as robust. Trying to click outside the already-loaded areas usually just gets me a “There were technical problems, reload this page” error. In order to watch the video, I’d need the entire thing to load in one shot, and I failed to achieve that in what must have been at least a dozen tries on a short, 4 minute video. For not even letting me get to a significant chunk of the video, they get an F.