Still more to come from YouTube

If you think YouTube has transformed television, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

I’ve spent most of today playing with YouTube (and its little-known RSS feeds), for a piece of work to be unveiled next week (er, probably). The plan was to embed the latest handful of videos from a given YouTube account into a site’s homepage: and it proved remarkably easy, with some rudimentary PHP and a bit of lateral thinking. The effect is really, really nice. Don’t be surprised to see more and more sites doing this.

Then there’s news that YouTube is planning higher-quality video streaming. I wasn’t previously aware that YouTube stored the video in whatever format you uploaded it, and converted it to Flash ‘on the fly’; I always assumed it was the other way round. Now YouTube is saying they’re working on ‘a player that detects the speed of the viewer’s Net connection and serves up higher-quality video if viewers want it… high-quality YouTube videos will be available to everyone within three months… all video is stored at the native resolution in which it was sent.’

One thought on “Still more to come from YouTube”

  1. Interesting – we’ve always assumed there’s no point uploading video at higher quality than 320×240. Incidentally, the quote you reference, isn’t at odds with the suggestion that video is STORED in its Flash-converted form – all Chen said, was effectively that the original was stored in an archive (and tacitly that they’re looking to leverage it more directly).
    Look forward to further news!!

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