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Well YouTube has finally done it – they’ve turned on HD for select movies uploaded in a high enough format to support it.
You guys probably noticed the new widescreen player rollout a few weeks ago, it looks like that was Part 1 of the transition. Part 2 was to actually enable a “watch in HD” link at the bottom corner of movies that supported it. A step up above the “watch in high quality” that was already there.
Here’s a test movie of the Resident Evil 5 co-op demo. Click the link to watch, but be sure to hit the “watch in HD” link otherwise it will look like this:
It’s a pretty damn drastic difference.
There is also some murmering about YouTube recent policy changes that were put in place to favor sponsored content over user-generated content; severly curbing the likelyhood of overnight hits like “Leave Britney Alone” in favor of a mock Pepsi commercial or something along those lines.
Some state that YouTube is “growing up” and the days of posting videos of your kicks dropping a snickers on the ground for a 4sec video are numbered.
Is anyone surprised? With the likes of Hulu around and YouTube’s announcement that they will be supporting full-featured movies just like Hulu, it’s no surprised that they are maturing the service.
As far as any competitors stepping in and taking the reigns… I can’t imagine any other company wanting the cost of that bandwidth burden that Google had.
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December 6th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
I’ve been using Vimeo.com for a while now because they support full HD video. For a free account you can only do one HD video a week, but for most people that is probably enough. If not you can pay like $60 a year for unlimited HD uploads (up to 2 GB a week if I remember right). I’ve really enjoyed the quality of their videos even on the non-HD stuff because it looks a lot better than any other sites I’ve tried.
December 7th, 2008 at 3:17 am
Wow! I justed checked out the youtube HD and I must say, very nice. It is a huge difference.
December 7th, 2008 at 8:33 am
Jigsaw,
I’ve always preferred *watching* Vimeo content. It’s usually very sharp like you send, and tends to lean towards amateur-production video as opposed to cell-phone-fodder.
But like Shadowolf said this new YouTube move is looking pretty dang sharp, with the ubiquity of YouTube that could give Vimeo a serious run for it’s money.
For authors interested in SEO, you also have to consider the inevitable YouTube-preference that Google must hold — certainly the integrated snapshot-in-search-results they are already showing for YouTube videos over the likes of other video sites.
I know that’s the only reason I’ve ever used YouTube before, because of the size of the audience and exposure I get to the search engine.
I’m pretty excited about this.
December 7th, 2008 at 9:27 am
Yeah, there is a much larger audience on YouTube so it is definitely great they are adding HD support.