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.’
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!!