Which Local Telco Gives You The Best YouTube Video Experience In Your Area? Check Here
Useful if you're experiencing constant YouTube buffering on mobile.
By John Lim — 30 Mar 2017, 06:10 PM
Most Malaysians depend on mobile data to watch YouTube videos on-the-go, but is your telco's streaming quality at its best? Or are you constantly experiencing buffering issues?
Behold, the grey spinning wheel of death.
We’ve all been there: you’re watching a YouTube video when all of a sudden it pauses and starts buffering, especially right when the video starts getting good.
It's really annoying.
To find out, Google Malaysia has rolled out a new online tool that will provide locals with a measure of how well their data connection handles YouTube videos
Called "Video Checkup from YouTube", the tool measures connection speed of each local telco and ranks them accordingly.
The measurements then show whether a telco serves mostly standard definition (SD) or high definition (HD) videos in a given area.
Malaysia is the first and only country to have this new video checkup feature.
The scores are based on real measurements, curated from billions of YouTube views
According to Digital News Asia, four stars is the highest possible rating at this time as ratings above are reserved for future technology that supports higher bandwidth video such as virtual reality (VR) and 360-degree videos.
The tool's methodology page states that only users with LTE-enabled devices are measured
Therefore, the scoring excludes non-LTE device to give a clearer representation of an actual experience with a modern smartphone and plan. However, LTE phone users that switched to 3G due to limited coverage are included in the rating.
Currently, only video requests from official YouTube applications on Android and videos in modern formats are taken into account
Some of the apps include YouTube, YouTube Kids, YouTube Gaming, and YouTube Music.
Similarly, measurements from phones running very old versions of system software or application software are excluded due to limited measurement and reporting capabilities.
Roaming users are excluded from the rating too.