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YouTube Feather: Low Bandwidth Video Viewing

By Wayan Vota on December 21, 2009

Trying to watch a YouTube video on the low-bandwidth connections common in Africa is an experience in frustration. Download speeds are so slow that you often wait more than a minute for every minute of video. A 5 minute YouTube video can take 10 or 15 minutes to download. And if you’re on Nigerian Internet – forget about it.

For everyone who starts a YouTube video download and then takes a nap, we now have a low-bandwidth viewer: YouTube Feather

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.

But Feather has another advantage – its great for low-power computers too. Because of its lower processor needs, it runs better on Inveneo Certified Solutions than regular YouTube. And let’s be honest, when do you use the advanced YouTube features that Feather strips out?

You can sign up for the YouTube Feather Beta here and once you do test it with ICTworks YouTube Channel.

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Wayan Vota co-founded ICTworks. He also co-founded Technology Salon, MERL Tech, ICTforAg, ICT4Djobs, ICT4Drinks, JadedAid, Kurante, OLPC News and a few other things. Opinions expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of his employer, any of its entities, or any ICTWorks sponsor.
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