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I have noticed this more than once now. If I try to view a youtube video via Facebook, the stuff doesn't show up quickly. The same video if I get through youtube directly at the same time, streaming starts almost instantly. I finish my video on youtube and facebook is still trying to fetch it. Well, there are multiple questions here:

1. Does Youtube throttle Facebook servers? They could well do it owing to a high traffic rate from Facebook servers.
2. Is Facebook - Youtube network a bottleneck? This could be owing to the traffic that flows between the two websites. Facebooks hosted videos work fine, so facebooks servers are certainly not overloaded.
3. What format is Facebook trying to fetch the video from Youtube in? Well, Youtube does content adaptation to match the rate of incoming connection. So if I view a video on a extremely high speed network, Youtube would show me HD. On my home network I get 360 by default and that streams slowly too. So I manually switch to 240. If Facebook tries to fetch video in a particular format from Youtube and tries to send that over on my slow connection at home, that explains where the problem is.
4. Finally, is Facebook trying to throttle Youtube fetch from its own side? No idea.

I finished writing this post and Facebook is still fetching the Youtube hosted video as I write.

Cheers,
Manish.

Labels: facebook, throttling, video, youtube