YouTube, that famous video sharing website owned by Google, recently announced that the video upload size on it’s site will go from 100 MB to 1 GB. What does that mean? Well, it means higher quality video since the 10 minute time limit is still in place.
When YouTube was founded it was unique. It was the very first video site to use flash and allow you to use simple HTML to embed video content into web pages. Truly, this revolutionized online video. No longer did you have to be an expert in web to have video on your site. If you had a digital video, you could just upload it to YouTube, copy the embed code that was generated, and paste it into your site! The only caveat, video was often grainy and of low quality.
However, just like everything in the tech world, just as you get something figured out, someone else comes along and does it better. Users no longer want low quality, grainy video on the internet. Other sites, such as Vimeo have HD content. Even the SD content looks better on many other sites.
Even though YouTube still gets the lion’s share of web video traffic, they know that if they do not keep up in quality, they’ll never be sustainable. So this is an initial step. Will HD be in the near future? I’d like to think so.
What Next?
When Google bought YouTube people wondered how they would make any money. I believe that the powers that be are up to something that will change how we view network content. YouTube announced recently that it has a deal with CBS to show some of its older shows (Star Trek TOS is one!) with advertising. Not the ads that users are accustomed to, where you have to click the ad, but ads that actually interrupt the video stream. This is a big shift for YouTube that may make other content providers more open to uploading their video on the site.
I think YouTube, with it’s size additions, and deal with CBS is vying for that blooming online television market that. Even though sites like HULU already have full length television shows online, YouTube has name recognition. I think these are baby steps to what could revolutionize the way we watch programming. The shift has been coming for a long time, but when a name like YouTube gets behind it, gears begin moving faster.
P. S. For those of you who are reading this and wondering why a website called “That Geeky CHRISTIAN” didn’t mention GodTube, the “Christian Alternative” to YouTube, I’ll give it a review tomorrow.
Filed under: Web
