To be honest, most of the time, I watch YouTube on my phone. Partially this is because I can't access it at work.
In terms of being special, I don't think its very special. They use Flash and HTML5 to display their videos. I believe the idea is that Flash isn't a public standard, while HTML5 is so Google wants to switch to HTML5, which should also enable it to offer a single website for browsers, phones and devices, such as their android phones and the ChromeOS laptop may release soon, as well as tablets. A while ago Google did come out to say that they are not going to Abondone Flash for HTML5, but their long term goal is to use WEBM
They offer different formats, depending on the client and the resolution you wish to view the video on and what the author selected. If you have shitty bandwidth, you may want to put your video quality to something closer to standard. This will change the resolution, but the size/bandwidth requirements should also go down, allowing your browser to load the video faster.
Honestly, for most videos, I doubt that quality on a laptop or tablet screen will matter much. Do I really need to watch some 30 second segment in 1080p resolution? I don't think so. On the other hand, Google / Youtube is putting out a lot of new streaming stuff that works on TVs and large screens and on there it may make a difference, but if you plan on replacing your TV service with online solutions (something we've discussed in other posts), you may want to bump your bandwidth a bit. I think the big difference between YouTube and a lot of other stuff, like your pron is the HD quality of lot of the videos. A ton of the content I see online, including the occasional adult material that I may have seen, is usually in SD quality, while Youtube has made a big push to serve stuff in HD. Again, setting your preferences to SD may fix some of your issues.
The Highest quality of Videos are using WebM format (
http://www.webmproject.org/) which is supposed by all the major open source browsers and even by IE9 using a plugin. Right now only some of the higher HD content is using WebM.
In terms of figuring out the cause of the speed issue, there is a few steps you can take to figure out what may be the problem. One is to stream some videos and watch your router to see how much traffic it is processing. Depending on your SOHO router, you may be able to use some open source network monitoring tool to get an idea of your bandwidth on your WAN line. Our provider is fairly shitty and doesn't offer a speed upgrade and I've noticed that if I combine anything other than regular browsing with Hulu or Netflix, the video/downloads suffer big time.
Another option is to enable QOS on your home router. This helps tremendously for audio/video applications. Probably the biggest success story I've seen was setting up VOIP users for our company. The ones with older routers had issues, which is kind of odd, considering that most voip protocols only use ~60kbps of traffic, yet a bunch of people had issues until I dialed in, enabled QOS for VOIP and bam, no more problems. You could do the same thing for streaming protocols which may help you if you are competing for bandwidth with crap that your kids may be downloading. Depending on your router, you may even be able to guarantee certain amount of your bandwidth to specific traffic, although those tend to be features on more expensive routers from Cisco.