The Find
I know many of us remember iFilm, or what it used to be before MTV bought it and merged it with SpikeTV. I’m sure many of us love iFilm, or what it used to be. Having seen this though, I’m sure YouTube will (once again) blow it out of the water. Quite an easy feat since it’s already kinda floating on the surface, but I digress.
Might want to give it a while (pronounced: ‘lunch break’) to load. Once it does though, you’ll see what I’m talking about. This is YouTubeHD, or so I’d like to call it. YouTube’s co-founder Steve Chen had announced on NewTeeVee Live on November 14th that they would be experimenting with HD uploads and that it’d most likely be released three months later.
This video by studiospecialplace (YT, WP – now closed, .de – not yet reopened) demonstrates that there’s obviously a work-around at the moment, best described by Graham Bailey’s blog.
Found through: gizmodo > CNET > Webware > NewTeeVee Live
Found through: gizmodo > Graham Bailey > YouTube
The Review
If I’ve understood this all correctly, future YouTube content will be available in standard and high definitions, if the uploader chooses to upload HD content. Those of us fortunate enough to be endowed with Spartan bandwidth will be able to choose HD viewing, simply because we can. Seems like a nice little feature for its users, but I can think of a few others that’ll be eying this feature.
You can imagine many an indie artist, like the creators of the previous video there, will try to show off their talents in HD. Aside from these though are the big time producers. Quite a few television networks and film production companies are semi-intelligent enough to understand and embrace what is viral marketing and thus have accounts on YouTube.
Given the Googlenets behind YouTube and the existing deals between them and the forementioned conglomerates, one can only imagine a future influx of HD movie trailers, high quality promos for television series and whatever junk they decide to spout out in amazing detail and pretty colours.
I take it you now see why I think this HD business might be a bit of a threat to iFilm/SpikeTV’s indie user base, if any of it is left. Despite the possible growth for big businesses on YouTube, you can see that their presence as of yet hasn’t stopped people like Tay Zonday and the like from getting their 15 minutes of fame. As for the technology itself, I’m quite exited and hope it will bring greater things than what my cynical mind can come up with.
So here’s to 2 girls 1 cup in HD.
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