Inside Online Video

Coming Soon: YouTube HD

by Mike Abundo on November 15th, 2007

As expected, the raising of the YouTube upload size cap heralds the coming of higher-quality YouTube videos.

YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, speaking at the NewTeeVee Live conference today, confirmed that high-quality YouTube video streams are coming soon. Although YouTube’s goal, he said, is to make the site’s vast library of content available to everyone, and that requires a fairly low-bitrate stream, the service is testing a player that detects the speed of the viewer’s Net connection and serves up higher-quality video if they want it.

Why wouldn’t they? Because the need to buffer the video before it starts playing will change the experience. Hence the experiment, rather than just a rapid rollout of this technology. On stage, he said the current resolution of YouTube videos has been “good enough” for the site up till now.

Chen told me that he expects that high-quality YouTube vids will be available to everyone within three months.

Chen also confirmed that in YouTube’s internal archive, all video is stored at the native resolution in which it was sent in. However, he said, a large portion of YouTube videos are pretty poor quality to begin with — 320 x 240. Streaming them in high-quality mode isn’t going to help much.

HD online video is nothing new. Flash players that can show multiple encodings based on detected connection speeds, however, are not quite as common. As per their usual strategy of late, YouTube waits for everyone else to come out with something before coming out with something nonlinearly better. I guess you can afford to bide your time when you’re the market leader bankrolled by Google.

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