YouTube does plan for the worst, you can even watch on a <100kbps connection if you're okay with 144p (and YouTube will downgrade to that automatically).
It seems that OP defines downgrading to 720p60 (?) as "broken".
I do support bringing back the 1080p30 stream though.
Edit: Tested in Chrome with the "Slow 3G" throttling profile. YouTube automatically falls back to 240p with some buffering.
OP is defining a downgrade that 40% of the UK users now have to fall back to 480p since 720p60 won't work and 1080 won't work. OP wants 720p30 back since it s the highest resolution that 40% users were able to use before the change. 480p, seriously?
It's rather that they have 4Mbps for 720p30 to play well. They don't reach 5Mbps hence 720p60 buffers. We could argue about whether that's 10% or 40% of the UK that is affected. I see your point.
It's affecting 40% of the population, everybody with a connection less than 8 Mbps, give or take. 1080p60 is around 6 Mbps, need a 7-8 Mbps connection to work well.
The 20% who had a connection 4-8 Mbps and could do 1080p got downgraded to 720p60. The 20% who had a 2-5 Mbps connection and could do 720p got downgraded to 480p.
Obviously it's not clear cut, there's a continuous spectrum where things will load much slower and start having breaks in playback until you really have to drop the resolution.
Well, we should also consider households having more than one person. Two people watching YouTube requires double the bandwidth, going into 12 Mbps+ territory. Truth be told, this is affecting more than 40% of the population.
It's clever to push lower quality, but here they push to a lower quality than what was achievable so far before the "upgrade". So from a user standpoint, YouTube have downgraded the service overnight for all low speed connections.
The more frustrating being for users that could sustain 1080p yesterday and are "upgraded"(?) to 720p60 today. Roughly same bandwidth but much lower resolution for what? better frame-rate? Not sure why anyone would prioritize frame-rate over resolution with all our fancy HiDPI screen.
When you watch a video with text or small content, like a gaming video for example, these have menus and texts, it stops being readable when downgraded from 1080p to 720p (or worse). It's broken.
When you live with flatmates or family, you're getting crazy load time and erratic pauses now because of the contention.
There's not enough headroom to buffer ahead with the bandwidth use increasing 50% overnight. The video is dropping as soon as somebody else opens something, it's effectively broken.
The algorithm will see contention and downgrade the quality, only to upgrade it again a minute later when it sees a bit of headroom, only to fail again. There's a lesson here on network contention. Worse case is with 2 people browsing youtube, the 2 players are fighting each other for bandwidth.
Dude, I don't have time to watch 20-minute videos in response to every comment, especially when they don't appear relevant. You need to try to give more concise points if you want responses.
I don't know, I just watched some newly uploaded videos available exclusively in 30fps. TFA shows a screenshot where there's no 720p(30) or 1080p(30) option though, so it must be happening to some videos.
(Does it even make sense to "upgrade" a 30/29.97 fps origin video to 60fps? I don't think so.)
Many apps assume 100% internet connectivity at all times. i.e. not even minimally functional when offline.
They assume a certain speed, latency and packet loss (zero).
The adage should be: plan for the worst, then adjust for reality.