Rant: Youtube

What on earth was Google thinking when they acquired Youtube? I'll tell ya what. They were thinking of all that ad revenue they were gonna channel (heh heh) their way, and in addition to that, how to cut costs for them overall with the new service. So what'd they do? Lots of stuff, but I'm just gonna focus on the one change that TICKS me off the most: The Rendering.
    I remember (back when all I had was Dial-up) being able to start a Youtube video at night, letting it render overnight, and then playing it the next day. I'd have to pick which one I wanted to see, and was always excited about seeing it the next day ( though I don't recall why I couldn't do two or more...). Now, however, Google's Youtube Only lets the video render something like 30 seconds ahead of you. So if you were planning on letting it render before you watched, you're out of luck. But another thing that perhaps makes me even more furious is that once you've watched it, you cannot go back and watch it again without it re-rendering! And for that matter, you can't even skip back 2 seconds without it requiring a re-render! What the heck, Google?! The 30 second limit I can maybe understand... from the little I understand about web technologies, only rendering 30 seconds of video may cut the payload on their servers, and for people only planning on watching 5 seconds in a video walkthrough or something, it may work out nice, while saving Google's servers the hassle of letting you download more than what you "need". But re-rendering what you just waited to have rendered? That doesn't make any sense whatsoever! For one, it means you have to wait all over again to have it render, and it means that Google's servers have to work once again to let you download it, but more importantly, it means that anyone with a download cap is definitely going to suffer.
     So in a nutshell, this whole deal with Google limiting and cutting off renders isn't good for any of their users, but I don't know how it could be helping them as well. Time'll tell if this "Issue" is ever solved, but from what I've seen of Google, if it requires very much cash or time to fix, they'll be all to happy to let it remain unsolved.


/Rant