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by marcan_42 1518 days ago
No, the throttling is much more aggressive than real time. I suspect it's Google's way of sneakily breaking ancient YouTube clients that won't run arbitrary JS as a countermeasure for downloaders, without really breaking them all the way, so users of e.g. ancient smart TVs just think their network is (unusably) slow instead seeing an outright error, so they don't complain en masse that their TV no longer works properly.

Typical video bitrates for bog standard 1080p30 will be in the 1MB/s range, so the throttling is around 20x slower than real time.
2 comments
mdp2021 1518 days ago
Right: I forgot about the higher end encodings. 50kB/s is a speed similar to that of the "base" 360p ("format 18") - ~100MB every half hour.
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mdp2021 1518 days ago
Sorry, one detail (cannot edit the former reply): 1080p30 will be in the 1Mbit/s range (not «1MB/s»). That's maybe ~2.5x slower (not 20x).
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