Obama videos become first direct downloads from YouTube
As he takes office, there’s plenty of talk in the tech world about how Barack Obama’s presidency will change the Internet. While he can’t claim the credit, he’s already involved one welcome change: officially downloadable YouTube videos.
YouTube videos have been available to download for some time, but only unofficially through third-party applications such as the FireFox plug-in Fast Video Download, or my personal favorite idesktop.tv which also converts the files to different formats.
However, most of these techniques simply download the Flash video file used for the streaming on YouTube itself. This can be fiddly, and usually leave you with fairly poor format clips.
In what appears to be an experiment, several videos in the Obama channel on YouTube are now available to download. One such clip is at http://youtube.com/watch?v=qN1S1LdkUeg.
As you can see, it’s a fairly low-key process: there’s a simple ‘Click to download’ button at the bottom left of the video. The downloaded file is an MPEG-4 video of 13MB, a little over 3MB per minute of footage. Unlike downloads from external applications, the quality is pretty decent and certainly easy to watch in full-screen mode.
YouTube isn’t saying much about the clips: there’s no mention on the company blog, and a spokesman simply told CNET, “Nothing further to announce at this time. We’re just excited to have made this feature available in preparation for a historic week in American politics.” However, there are reports it will be extended to other government-produced videos.
Bandwidth costs aside, there’s no technical reason why this couldn’t eventually be available for all YouTube videos. However, doing so would likely change the way people use the site: with high-quality clips available to watch off-line and even burn to DVD, YouTube would be much more attractive as a way to distribute longer clips such as full TV shows or even movies. That would surely increase the number of copyright violations on the site and put YouTube under even more pressure from studios.
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