Earlier this year, Google introduced its Video Quality Report that measures the performance of your Internet Service Provider based on YouTube content playback. At the time, Google’s project was only available for users in Canada. Four months later, the company is sharing that its Video Quality Test will now be available to users in the United States as well. As part of the campaign, Google has a handy interactive graphic that illustrates the process of serving up YouTube videos to your device. Google says its report feature will continue to expand to countries beyond the United States and Canada “in the coming months”.
The relationship between ISPs and large content providers like Netflix, Hulu and YouTube has become pretty contentious lately. To bring some transparency into how well ISPs deliver video content, Netflix launched its ISP Speed Index a while ago and today, YouTube is bringing a somewhat similar report to the U.S. The Google Video Quality Report will show which ISPs in your area can sustain an HD YouTube video feed and which ones may only let you watch standard definition 360p video without buffering. To become “HD Verified,” an ISP has to be able to show HD for more than 90 percent of streams over the last 30 days. The throughput required for this, Google tells me, is about 2.5 Mbps. As an extra, the report also gives you some details about when people are watching YouTube videos in your town and how many of them are getting HD and SD streams.