I actually like the Soul Society storylines better than the Living Word storylines in these filler episodes. From the looks of it the two should be merging shortly.
I also noticed that the 3rd seat of squad three resembled the Arrancar who Uryu and Renji were fighting. That may be intentional to get us to distrust him and suspect him of releasing the hallows. I think another explanation are that the 3rd seat and the captain (and possibly Yamamoto) see they need to strengthen Izuru, and that was part of the plan to make that happen. A third possible scenario is that the demented 12th seat captain Mayuri set it as a trap and intended to use Izuru and the 3rd seat as part of his experiment, and that the unknown soul reaper was one of his creations (like Nemu) which would explain a possible reason why Izuru didn't recognize him.
To Treblegni if you download the episodes they will play at their normal size instead of being altered by the browser you are viewing the video from.
http://videobleach.com/bleach-downloads