Report (What has been done and Why)

Part A: Finding out the cause

1. As YouTube has come under Google's ownership recently, we emailed Google Team to ask why they restrict access to certain videos as explained in the introduction. Unfortunately, due to restriction on confidential information disclosure, Google declined to reveal any information to us.

2. We next carried out an experiment as follows:

• Accessed a video on ViiKii on 6 March 2010, after it was released on 4 March 2010 from http://mysoju.com, a free platform that provides links to videos streamed elsewhere.
• The restricted access problem arose.
  
• However, the same video, without subtitles from ViiKii, was still accessible from YouTube itself. This has an important implication that YouTube is still able to cater for additional requests, but just that it denied simultaneous requests from one source (i.e. ViiKii server for example)
  
• After activating ViiKii plug-in, the video with subtitles played smoothly on Mysoju.

3. YouTube forum suggested to us that this is more a problem of spambots. Normally, YouTube will require users to verify themselves as human if it suspects that the many requests sent from a particular user are actually from a spamming program. A verification code is expected to be entered to complete the procedure. When watching the video from a third-party site, no verification is available for the users to verify themselves, and hence being denied access.

Conclusion: Capacity of cloud computing infrastructure is not the cause, but spambot concern is.

Part B: Investigating the existing solutions

1. ViiKii Plug-in - A temporary solution
As demonstrated, using the ViiKii plug-in can alleviate the problem. However, not all users have successfully deployed the tool. The plug-in also needs frequent upgrade to match YouTube's streaming method.

Again, we faced the problem with obtaining information directly from related party, ViiKii, so we have made certain guesses on how this plug-in works to see what problem it really solves.

Using http://whatismyipaddress.com, we check our IP address before and after activating the ViiKii plug-in. The result obtained was that our IP address did not change throughout the experiment. However, it is possible that the IP address can be changed externally before reaching the YouTube server. Hence, the plug-in may work on the principle of re-routing network and assigning a different address for each user when contacting the YouTube server.


2. Closed Caption Feature (Beta) - A technology in infancy
A potential rival to what ViiKii's service is YouTube's Closed Caption feature. This is an automatic transcribing and translating function that will allow users to use on CC-enabled videos to watch them in their native language. This feature uses Google's Voice Recognition Technology.

Still in its Beta phase, YouTube's CC can only work with videos in English and of high audio quality. As a result, it is not a direct competitor to ViiKii, as the latter mainly provides subtitles to drama series in Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages.