It would help if Youtube made it possible to play videos at maybe 1.4x or 2x their regular speed. It's still not as fast as reading, but less slow. I yearn for the day when all of Youtube's videos use the HTML5 video tag, and we can do this at the browser level.

I am confused (cf Grice) by that statement, because it's all true about the particular video: if you are in the beta, then it uses the video tag and offers (at least to me) a control to switch to 2x. Even if it is flv, you could download the video and run it in a standalone player. A standalone player also lets you get past the 2x offered by youtube, my chipmunking software (quicktime) doesn't work well past that. I think there are better algorithms, though. (ETA: almost all youtube videos have mp4 downloads, even if they aren't available as html5. I don't actually have a flv codec.)

I used to multitask (and still do with the news in the morning), but I find I get a lot more out of the talk if I pay attention. And running it fast makes that a lot easier, since it's all or nothing.