HD Videos on YouTube?
Although we’re still encountering low-quality, pixelated videos on YouTube, the cries for higher quality video are getting louder. Back on November 14th, a CNET article quoted YouTube co-founder Steve Chen as saying that he expects that “high-quality YouTube videos will be available to everyone within three months.”
Three months…let’s see: December, January, February…Hey: that was five days ago! That’s right, and YouTube just happened to throw a party in New York five days ago, unveiling several new features. But the one thing that was conspicuously absent from the presentations was any mention of HD or any other form of quality improvement to the video player. Instead, YouTube is adding new video sharing, editing and hosting applications (boring).
In November, Chen insisted that YouTube’s quality was “good enough,” and that they place more of an emphasis on accessibility than video quality, which is a fair point. The question that emerges, then, is whether YouTube will be left behind by competitors that bill themselves as “HD,” like Vimeo.
Below, I’ve embedded a rather exaggerated contrast between two time-lapse driving videos in Vimeo and YouTube players.
Avene - Fast Drive from Avene on Vimeo.
Of course, it’s not really a fair comparison, because those two videos were shot with different cameras and they were of different quality to begin with, but they are still fairly representative of the average quality difference between the videos that are played on each site. In a way, that proves Chen’s other point, which is that most YouTube videos are low-quality in the first place. Even if YouTube goes HD, the quality of crappy videos like the lower one won’t be improved to the quality of the one above it.The other point that I take from this is that YouTube’s lag in hosting high-quality video has created an opening for competition, which is always a good thing.
A fair comparison would show the same video on both a high quality player and YouTube. For that, check out Hassan’s “Hair to the Chief” video on Fresh Cut and on Youtube.
