I will have to check this out when I get the chance. I was deeply saddened when YouTube killed their "Feather beta" feature which presented a super-minimal version of the site with the intention of reducing load times on slower internet connections.
If your internet connection is too slow to handle a more detailed interface, how on earth is it going to cope with doing something like streaming video and sound?
cat $(select_ad_file $user) $video_fileAn additional reason for not serving ads in the video file is that their ad clients probably want to know if someone watched it or not. By loading ad as a file associated with the ad client it's easy to verify that someone watched the ad and didn't just click out after 1s, etc.
there's the closest thing you'll get to an official lightweight youtube site.