I read an article recently that made it seem as if VPN wasn't the panacea for GFW that westerner's think it is. Apparently the GFW throttles encrypted connections heavily outside of normal business hours.
I was honestly had no problems reading about Tieneman Square on Wikipedia while walking around Tieneman Sqaure last year during National Week. The thing is most of the people who know about this stuff already do and the regular Joe on the street isn't going to put work into it. The people on the ground are a lot of the time patriotic to a fault. It reminded me a lot of the non-questuoning patriotism that permeates midwest America. And honestly I got the idea they desperately want to be America (*with Chinese characteristics;) ).That being said using a VPN only is not the best solution. A suite of software solutions working in concert is a much better route. Certain VPN providers are better than others given their size or implementation but even still the large ones see huge reductions in reliability during patriotic times (i.e. National Week etc). Best to RYO or use a concert of software implementations.
You may have to compromise on either speed or quality, but watching videos is not impossible. FWIW I had the best connection at 4 in the night, when I assume no one else in my apartment complex was still online. (All data 1 year out of data. Maybe everything is different now.)