Facebook started it and now Youtube is catching up with it. Yes, it’s the Lite technique which is now called ‘Feather (beta)’ for low bandwidth users of Youtube.
According to Youtube:
This is an opt-in beta for “Feather” support on YouTube. The “Feather” project is intended to serve YouTube video watch pages with the lowest latency possible. It achieves this by severely limiting the features available to the viewer and making use of advanced web techniques for reducing the total amount of bytes downloaded by the browser. It is a work in progress and may not work for all videos.
Statistics are removed and we cannot share a video. Assign a rating to a video; it is possible to mark a video as a favorite. The footer is simplified; all links that are usually below one page are also deleted.
At present, the lightweight version only works with a certain number of videos and seen only in English. On a video on the right page is always an option to experiment again checkbox.
To join the Feather beta program just visit http://www.youtube.com/feather_beta and click on the “Join Feather beta program”.
