This is an obvious thing for them to do, but the surprising part about it to me is that half the time youtube is too slow to play a video clip I choose. It's very unreliable, so it will be interesting to see how well the streams work.
However: just now watching eyepatchentertainment's test broadcast I find it remarkable. Sharp picture. Perfectly synced sound. Smooth scroll of live comments. Unknown fps, but it has no jerkiness to video.
I worry for what this will do re" jacquesm's ww.com.
Looks like youtube-live will be setting the standard for streaming vid.
That said, I still think it's crazy that the quality of service for Youtube's ads seems to be a priority over the actual video.
What it does is it loads the first chunk of a request to start playing with high bandwidth, but it then throttles the connection to approximately the bitrate of the video stream. The idea is that YouTube reduces the costs (bandwidth, CPU, routing etc.) of transferring bits that are never actually consumed, because the user stopped watching the video before it finished playing.
The quickest way to get a YouTube video is to download it with a download manager that sends multiple requests. Those requests ought to trigger the initial burstiness, and if you have enough of them either the initial burst will be sufficient to cover the whole file or the total bandwidth (even though throttled) across all simultaneous downloads will reach your own download bandwidth.
They, or our ISP overlords, perhaps.
Just use VLC's "Open Network File" menu command and paste the YouTube URL. Plays at highest resolution possible. Works great for me.