"Verizon support has assured me that they are not throttling down any streaming. I will trust them until they prove otherwise."
Verizon may not be overtly throttling or shaping their network traffic but instead have allowed their peer-networks to become so congested they achieve the same objective, which is to cripple the HD video streams for their competition.
The news regarding this issue is widely published across the Internet so there is no plausible way Verizon can deny this.