I love this story. The moral is not that folk in Siberia could now watch video, but that a whole chunk of the distribution lying between "fast US fiber" and "siberian 2.4kbps wet string" had their experience dramatically shifted to the left, enough so that new outliers impacted the average. Even after noting the lesson about the limitations of reliance on averages, still it skipped over this key element.

I remember the YouTube feather opt-in being spread by word of mouth at the time by folk in the tech community on fast connections. People really care about this stuff and the only reliable way to know is by engaging them directly.