YouTube goes HD
By John Lister
YouTube has begun promoting high definition content on its site. It’s also testing portals to bring news, music and movie content together.
The site has actually been offering HD content for a couple of weeks but hadn’t made a big deal of it. That’s likely because it was waiting to see if there were any glitches in the system before attracting too much interest.
The new format runs the risk of being somewhat confusing as YouTube already offers a ‘Higher Quality’ option for viewing clips. Uploaders don’t get to decide if their clip falls into this category. Instead it depends on the ‘quality’ of the video and the bandwidth of the particular viewer looking at the clip. There’s no specific guideline for ‘quality’ though YouTube’s help pages strongly imply that a 480 pixel wide clip will qualify.
This system will continue, but now any clip at least 720 pixels wide will be listed as, and available in, ‘high definition’ rather than ‘higher quality’.
To promote the change, YouTube has added an HD category to go alongside ‘most popular’ and ‘most viewed’. It’s worth noting that even if you view a video from this category listing, you’ll still have to click on ‘play in HD’ underneath the clip itself.
The good news is that clips certainly do look significantly smoother, particularly in full-screen mode. The bad news is that the picture may be better quality, but the content sure isn’t. Most of the clips listed as added today are simply people talking to a webcam, which really doesn’t need HD.
And while a music video featuring Molly Sims and Justin Timberlake is certainly more HD-friendly, it doesn’t look great when curious visitors check out the HD section and find the number two video is listed as ‘Jizz In My Pants’.
YouTube is also launching new ‘landing pages’ for music, movies and news, which will bring together clips from the site and relevant information such as Google News headlines. It’ll be interesting to see whether the entertainment sites are subject to paid promotions of clips, and what type of editorial judgment is used on the news section.
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