Scrape title by only downloading relevant part of webpage

I would like to scrape just the title of a webpage using Python. I need to do this for thousands of sites so it has to be fast. I've seen previous questions like retrieving just the title of a webpage in python, but all of the ones I've found download the entire page before retrieving the title, which seems highly inefficient as most often the title is contained within the first few lines of HTML.

Is it possible to download only the parts of the webpage until the title has been found?

I've tried the following, but page.readline() downloads the entire page.

import urllib2
print("Looking up {}".format(link))
hdr = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0',
       'Accept': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
       'Accept-Charset': 'ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3',
       'Accept-Encoding': 'none',
       'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.8',
       'Connection': 'keep-alive'}
req = urllib2.Request(link, headers=hdr)
page = urllib2.urlopen(req, timeout=10)
content = ''
while '</title>' not in content:
    content = content + page.readline()

-- Edit --

Note that my current solution makes use of BeautifulSoup constrained to only process the title so the only place I can optimize is likely to not read in the entire page.

title_selector = SoupStrainer('title')
soup = BeautifulSoup(page, "lxml", parse_only=title_selector)
title = soup.title.string.strip()

-- Edit 2 --

I've found that BeautifulSoup itself splits the content into multiple strings in the self.current_data variable (see this function in bs4), but I'm unsure how to modify the code to basically stop reading all remaining content after the title has been found. One issue could be that redirects should still work.

-- Edit 3 --

So here's an example. I have a link www.xyz.com/abc and I have to follow this through any redirects (almost all of my links use a bit.ly kind of link shortening). I'm interested in both the title and domain that occurs after any redirections.

-- Edit 4 --

Thanks a lot for all of your assistance! The answer by Kul-Tigin works very well and has been accepted. I'll keep the bounty until it runs out though to see if a better answer comes up (as shown by e.g. a time measurement comparison).

-- Edit 5 --

For anyone interested: I've timed the accepted answer to be roughly twice as fast as my existing solution using BeautifulSoup4.