YouTube Announces IPv6 Support

Google's YouTube video-sharing service now offers support for IPv6.

In a blog post announcing the move, Network Engineer Lorenzo Colitti and Software Engineer Steinar Gunderson said there has been significant demand for IPv6 support among YouTube users.

Colitti and Gunderson said:

"Since the very first announcement of ipv6.google.com (IPv6 connection required; if you don't have it, ask your ISP to deploy it), 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. 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. This is a good day for YouTube, our users and for an open and accessible Internet."

The post described the limitations of IPv4, the current version of IP, and expands on why IPv6 is the better alternative.

"IPv6 has a vastly larger address space (128-bit) and allows everyone to have an incredibly large number—264 or more—of personalized IP addresses for all their devices (think of it as having a whole telephone exchange in your home)," Colitti and Gunderson said.