The mediocre quality of YouTube's video and sound hasn't stopped its fantastic success.
However, it now faces challenges from Hulu et al, and from its Google bosses, who must be wondering when it's going to start making some money. The answer, of course, is to follow Hulu and provide some good quality official content that it can put adverts against. So that's what it's doing.
Meghan Keane at Wired Blogs has posted some normal and HD videos of Where the Hell is Matt? and pointed out that:
YouTube has quietly started testing out real HD quality videos on a smattering of its content, a development that is getting attention from viewers in message boards and blog forums this week. The new format could be a big move for YouTube, as the video size is over 80MB, which means that they are probably the same H.264 encoded mp4 files available in the iTunes store.
As a shortcut to HD, where available, you can add &fmt=22 to the end of a YouTube video URL.
OK, you need a very fast connection and a nippy PC to exploit the HD format, but a growing number of people already have those.
The problem is that once you've seen and heard the HD version of a clip, the failings of the standard version become striking, even though you probably hadn't noticed them before. HD looks good, but it's making the rest of YouTube look bad.
