Tech Shout!

Search engine giant, Google is now warning that the rise of Internet video is causing a sort of a traffic jam on the web, and is threatening to put a significant dampener on global network speeds. In fact, with the growing popularity of services like YouTube, BitTortrent and Joost, the sheer volume of video data being moved from place to place is forcing the Internet infrastructure to suffer.

According to Vincent Dureau, Google’s head of TV technology, “The web infrastructure- and even Google’s- doesn’t scale. It’s not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect.”

On of the culprits is BitTorrent, a service that is being widely used by millions of people to obtain high-quality video over the Internet. In fact, many people use it to download episodes of U.S TV series like Lost, or even to see concert footage. Besides, BitTorrent has proved to be controversial with Hollywood, because many people also use the service to download movie illegally.

Despite the relatively small number of users, research indicates that systems such as BitTorrent are responsible for more than 50% of all internet traffic. Some executives fear that without proper investment, video download services could clog up the internet and cause online gridlock.

“Most of the internet traffic is peer-to-peer, and most of that is video. Every year we have to invest substantially just to maintain the user experience. In fact it has actually decreased,” Richard Alden, chief executive of Spanish cable company ONO, told the Cable Europe Congress in Amsterdam. “People don’t like to talk about [the fact] that just to stand still, they have to invest.”

Tensions are only likely to increase with the imminent arrival of Joost, a new London-based video venture from the dotcom entrepreneurs who invented internet telephony company Skype. Like BitTorrent, it also uses peer-to-peer systems. Internet users affected by such a scenario would most likely see their high-speed broadband connections slow to a crawl and top downloads speeds reduce.