YouTube to Upgrade to 1080p HD
YouTube is already showing much of its videos in 720p, but they are expected to offer users full 1080p HD quality starting next week. Although they are offering better quality, the 10 minute clip length limit will remain the same. It is likely though that they will increase the 2GB size limit.
Hunter Walk, the director of product management for YouTube, announced the big news during a conference on Thursday. He also noted that they will be launching a new full-screen player in only days.
Steve Chen, the video sharing site’s co-founder, also announced at the NewTeeVee 2007 conference that the clips that are uploaded in 1080p quality will be stored at that resolution. This means that the uploads will simply be re-encoded for the new player to feature the better quality resolution. Walk says that around half of the content uploaded in 1080p has been re-encoded already.
They also said that they aren’t worried about supporting the larger file size following extensive testing of the new capabilities. The site is already seeing more content coming from mobile devices than ever before. A spokesperson said that HD uploads have grown from 1% to almost 10% during just the last 11 months.
Better quality for videos is exactly what people want. This only makes watching clips of shows and music videos more enjoyable for users, especially since YouTube has an agreement with Channel 4 (and others) to steam shows on its site. Being able to download bigger files may bring more full length content to the site as well.
The video streaming website also has plans for more changes, which includes a non-Flash video player. Walk said that they are interested in broad accessibility, keeping an open mind. He noted that they have demonstrated a YouTube player based on HTML 5.
Comments
One Response to “YouTube to Upgrade to 1080p HD”
Got something to say?
A non flash YouTube would be great, flash has been taking the mick really on Mac OSX, I’ve been using Click2Flash and viewing in H.264 which is a world better than flash!