Web is the new TV

From WebWare.com:

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 viewers 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 untill now.

Chen told me he expects that high-quality YouTube videos 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. However, he said, a large portion of YouTube videos are pretty poor quality to begin with–320×240. Streaming them in high-quality mode isn’t going to help much.

Our take

While YouTube is a great site for social networking and sharing videos of varying quality to the world it has been sorely lacking on two fronts: video quality and content quality. With this move it looks like YouTube is taking care of the first problem which leaves the last one still unresolved. And considering the fact that most popular YouTube videos are of people talking to their webcams or running around filming their stupid friends doing stupid things a massive improvement in video quality is quite frankly a massive waste of resources.

Not to mention the fact that YouTube is already suffering from download lag due to massive demand - a problem which undoubtedly will multiply tenfold once the high-definition version goes online.