YouTube: Now light as a Feather

"Let's face it: in this age of instant gratification, even several seconds of loading time can feel like an eternity." How true.

With that precious knowledge in mind, YouTube on Thursday morning launched an ultralight version of the video site in beta, called Feather, immediately made available for testing through TestTube.

Even though many computers and network connections today are more than able to handle the site's onslaught of high quality video, high definition video, and now even 1080p, users with less powerful systems or weaker bandwidth may experience crippling slow-downs (that is, waiting a few seconds for a video to load). In fact, recent research run by the site itself found that casual YouTube users wanted the site to be trimmed down for a more optimal viewing experience.

Feather is YouTube's response to that request.

The video player, which loads standard quality as default, will always be the most prominent part of the page and has not suffered any changes. Everything surrounding the actual video (comments, related videos, sharing options, etc.), however, have all been reduced considerably to shave off those precious seconds of load time.

Content creators would be the only group suffering from the release of this version of YouTube, as they benefit most from user subscriptions and widespread sharing of their videos. If options for subscribing and sharing disappear, or are harder to find, content creators may have a harder time garnering attention. Nevertheless, YouTube has promised that Feather will not function on videos which are being monetized by their owners.

YouTube will be monitoring usage and latency in TestTube to see if it should do full release of Feather.