Watching some of the garbage on YouTube can be tortuous at the best of times, and even more so when you’re doing it with a piss-poor internet connection that causes it to freeze every few seconds. You sit there waiting for twenty seconds, the video plays for three or four seconds, then it starts buffering again. Half the time you just give up and walk away, go and look at something else on some other site. While the odd lag might be expected from a site that boasts around one million viewers a month, it’s still not good for business.

Luckily for us that YouTube seems to realize this, and its engineers are busy working on a new technique for streaming videos that should cut down on any frustrating delays significantly. Even better, it’s not only trying to do this for the web, but also for the mobile experience, which means that your dreams of spending hours watching the Nyan Cat while sitting on the bus going to work could soon become a reality.

Gizmodo recently took a behind-the-scenes look at what YouTube’s engineers are doing to cut down on the waiting time, and discovered that the main goal is to get videos to play instantly. The reason that they don’t right now – there’s always a delay while you wait for the page to load and the video to buffer before it plays – is due to the way the video is downloaded in one, complete chunk. John Harding, Team Leader of YouTube’s Core Engineering Team, told Gizmodo that if they can reduce the time it takes for a video to start playing to just 200 milliseconds or less, viewers will perceive that as being more or less instantaneous. If the video takes any longer than that to start playing – especially when all you’re trying to see is some short, dumb clip about goats terrorizing people – viewers are going to get frustrated. To prevent these delays, YouTube as been working on an initiative it calls “Sliced Bread” since 20102.

Sliced Bread takes its name from the new way in which YouTube videos download. Previously, the way it worked was that your computer would download the entire video at the same 480p default resolution unless you change this manually – not good if you’re living in somewhere like Thailand during the monsoon season, take it from me.

Under the Sliced Bread initiative, YouTube videos will now download themselves in smaller ‘slices’, depending on how fast your internet connection is. So for example, if you have a blazing fast internet connection YouTube will be able to sense this and stream the video at the highest possible 1080p resolution, while those living in Somalia will receive their downloads at a more manageable 360p. Should your blazing fast connection suddenly begin to lose bandwidth, YouTube will automatically reduce the stream to a lower bandwidth without having to stop and buffer the video. All you’ll notice is a slight difference in the image quality.

This is only a part of Sliced Bread however. Harding told Gizmodo that YouTube is working on other techniques to get videos to download even faster, which involves predicting which videos you’re likely to watch next and ‘pre-load’ the first segments of these so that they can play instantaneously. This process is currently being implemented on Android phones, and will soon roll out onto the web and iPhone as well.