...or is Youtube decreasing the performance on their videos when embedded in other sites? I was watching a video on a freshly-cleared Firefox cache, and embedded into a site, it seemed to take AGES to load. I got the URL of the video, cleared the cache again, and this time watched it directly on Youtube and it loaded completely in under 30 seconds.
This, with the in-video advertising (that cannot be completely removed) implanted on all new uploads, is making me very pissed off with Youtube lately. They're too busy putting shitty videos of cats and video blogs on the Featured list to care though.