It’s about time.
While other video sharing sites, including Vimeo, Dailymotion, and the recently shuttered Stage6, have offered high quality videos, YouTube has not made any visible headway towards that end until recently. The popular online video destination was recently found to be tinkering with the quality of some of its videos.
Users can get a preview of what these higher quality videos look like by adding either a “&fmt=6” or “&fmt=18” tag to the end of a video’s URL. This tweak will not work for every video, as only a small slice of YouTube’s giant video library has been re-encoded. Recently uploaded videos are much more likely to be compatible with this high-quality adjustment.
The resolution is upgraded from 320x240 to 480x360, and the sound is improved to stereo quality from the older mono format.
This is an important step for YouTube. Up until now it has been hampered by two things: a lack of professionally created content (especially from television networks, which seem bent on using their own video outlets), and poor video quality. Recent enhancements to its site have helped YouTube to remain interesting and appealing, and higher resolution and sound quality will certainly help it to maintain its lead.
As of Monday, there was no mention of the resolution and/or sound upgrades on YouTube’s official blog.
A recent eMarketer report expects about 154.2 million U.S. users to view an online video sometime in 2008. This is 52.5% of the entire country’s population, and would be a 12.1% increase from 2007.
With the market this large, and with the online video market maturing, viewers will demand and expect more from online video sites.
YouTube is also preparing to launch a live video service before 2008 ends.
Sources:
http://cybernetnews.com/2008/02/29/
watch-high-resolution-youtube-videos/
http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/03/03/youtube.resolution/
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/03/03/
report-online-video-audience-to-keep-growing
http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm
?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=77643
Jason Hahn
e: jhahn221@gmail.com
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