The YouTube Chronicles—Your Future is 16:9
Answer: 15 hours of content every minute.
Question: How much video goes up on YouTube, on average? That’s 60 minutes an hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. And this upload rate might actually increase.
But what does that number mean for you or your organization? If you have a say in your college or university’s video effort, isn’t YouTube just a social-networking site, far more appropriate for undergrads sharing their clips with friends (and possibly running the risk of bad-taste-by-association)?
That’s an outdated view. The future of online video standards will be driven by YouTube, and will stay that way for a while.
Why? For many really good and specific reasons, most centered on money. Leaving commerce aside for a while, from the tech side the main reason may be the most important: YouTube is a division of Google. And Google’s aim is to offer browser-based one-stop solutions for a variety of applications, from search (of course), to software (Google Docs, anyone?), to… high-quality, high-definition video hosting and distribution.
I had a chance to sit in on the “What’s Next?: The Digital Distribution Imperative” workshop at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, and YouTube’s director of content partnerships, Jordan Hoffner, brought the collected filmmakers to attention by formally announcing a few things that YouTube now does:
- YouTube offers full-HD capabilities, both for uploaded files and for clip playback. Users still have the option of viewing clips in normal quality, but HD likely will be the standard moving ahead.
- They’ve switched over to a standard 16:9 player, even for older clips recorded in 4:3 format. As this change sinks in with web teams of all types, this has implications ranging from web design, to video-player specification, to actual video production. Why plan on a 4:3 look and feel when the standard has changed?
- They’re going long-form. The old 10-minute limit has fallen by the wayside as YouTube recently soft-launched its feature-length channel, at http://www.youtube.com/movies.
I encourage you to visit, because this also means YouTube isn’t battling the film and television studios over copyrighted material anymore. It in fact has entered commercial partnerships with the BBC, CBS, Discovery, HBO, Lionsgate, MGM, PBS, Sony… and those were just the deals announced through January.
Did I mention the feature films available are free? It can a VERY mixed bag of quality, but a quick scan revealed “Koyaanisqatsi,” Richard Linklater’s “Slacker”, the 1967 “Casino Royale” directed by John Huston, “The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg”, and a personal favorite, “Drugstore Cowboy” from Gus Van Sant.
All for free, and streaming to my browser just fine.
It’s this last point that is most significant for the rest of us.
The studios WANT you to watch these films, documentaries, TV episodes, and other available content, through YouTube. There are a lot of different ways they’ll make money from this… but to make money, all these parties are working to make sure you have the best, most consistent and most reliable viewing experience possible. YouTube is making sure its server ranches, its pipelines going in and coming out, and its featured “revenue-possible” content are of the highest quality possible.
That benefits everyone who watches content on YouTube, everyone who posts content to YouTube… and of course, everyone who uses YouTube as their media server of choice or default, such as colleges or universities that upload clips there, then bring them back into their own sites for display on their own web pages, viewable in as high quality as our largest tech and media companies can provide.
And that is a topic for further discussion.
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