The YouTube player doesn't seem to use them except for embedded videos, so we can skip a network request.
But they still provide better error mesagges (for removed videos for example).
From now on, the line
from __future__ import unicode_literals
should be contained in every single Python file lest we run into any more 2.x/3.x issues.
Going forward, we're likely to develop on 3.x only and would likely miss subtle bugs otherwise.