Speed Matters: Introducing the YouTube Video Speed Dashboard

Your YouTube video speed can mean the difference between a fast and fun video viewing experience, or a slow and frustrating one. That's why, today, we're launching a YouTube video speed dashboard to make the speed information available to you.

YouTube video speed depends on many different factors some of which are the speed of your Internet connection, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) you are using and the distance to the video servers. The goal with this dashboard is to give you insight into what your YouTube speed looks like compared to the YouTube speed of users in other regions and different ISPs. We may also list the YouTube speeds for users in you neighborhood but with different ISPs. The speed numbers are calculated by measuring the speed at which YouTube video is received by the browser. This is then averaged over the previous 30 days provided you've used the same browser during this time period.

So, what can you do with all of this new data about your video speed? Well, that's entirely up to you. Some users will find it interesting to compare their city's average YouTube speed with the rest of the world's. Some will discover they're running at slower speeds compared to other users with the same ISP. A higher YouTube video speed translates to a better and faster experience not just for YouTube videos but for the Web in general; and by making this speed data available to users we would like to continue our ongoing efforts to make the web faster.

If you're interested in checking this feature out, go to http://youtube.com/my_speed and see just how fast your YouTube video speed is. Let us know what you think in the comment section below.

Kevin Carle, Engineer, recently watched "Charlie Brooker - How To Report The News," and Arvind Jain, Engineering Director, recently watched "Google's Experimental Fiber Network."