14 DAY TRIAL // YouTube quietly rolled out IPv6 support last week and has been deploying it across the site throughout this week. The video site has now made it official by announcing that YouTube is currently streaming videos over IPv6 through the networks that support the protocol. It marks a significant point in IPv6 adoption as YouTube is one of the largest websites to deploy support for the protocol and one of the most heavily trafficked sites on the planet.
"Since the very first announcement of ipv6.google.com, we have been committed to supporting IPv6 and have steadily added IPv6 support to more and more services. The service most requested to have IPv6 support has unquestionably been YouTube," Lorenzo Colitti, network engineer and IPv6 samurai (official title!) and Steinar H. Gunderson, software engineer and IPv6 mercenary (this one too), both working at Google, wrote.
"Given all of this, we're proud to make YouTube available over IPv6 and to begin streaming videos from a select number of sites worldwide to our Google over IPv6 partners. With YouTube on board, we now have a significant amount of content delivered on IPv6 and a real audience/traffic for it," they added.
For the regular users, it's likely not going to mean that much if anything at all. There aren't any tangible benefits to using IPv6 over the wide-spread IPv4 and most people aren't even going to be able to take advantage of the move as many ISPs don't support IPv6 yet. The reason why this is important doesn't have anything to do with the user, at least not directly, but with the health of the Internet as a whole.
Currently, all (most) devices to the Internet get a unique address to identify them among the billion others. The current system, based on the fourth revision of the Internet Protocol (IPv4), uses a 32-bit address and has served the Internet for decades. The problem is that we're quickly running out of addresses to hand out to new devices and, at the current growth rate, they'll all be gone very soon. There are some solutions to overcome this, NAT for example, but they cause more problems than they solve.
The solution is to switch to the new IPv6 revision which uses 128-bit addresses resulting in a very, very large cushion for growth. Most companies, though, have been slow to make the switch, partly because it wasn't a strict necessity yet. In a chicken-versus-egg type problem, with now real amount of traffic over IPv6, ISPs didn't have any incentive to deploy support and with no ISP support, most sites didn't make the switch either. With YouTube on board, things should really start moving.