News: Newteevee interviewed co-founder of YouTube Steve Chen. The transcript is here.
Analysis: The most revealing part of the discussion was Steve Chen’s explanation why YouTube isn’t improving the video quality of its site (to the level of other video sites). Here’s the exchange:
LIZ: Have you watched HD online?
STEVE: I want to be watching HD on his couch, not online. The type of content that they have on the site — 30 seconds — where you have to do something proactive (click on the next bit).
Audience person yells out HD. She wants HD. Loudly. With claps.
STEVE: They haven’t disregarded HD, it’s more about getting people all over the world being able to watch it. In parallel, they can implement higher quality. Up until now, it’s been “good enough” — but we’re interested in promoting higher-quality.
My take: I do wonder why it’s taking YouTube a while to upgrade the quality of video. People tolerate lower quality video on YouTube because the site has far more videos than other sites. But if you’d ask people, I’ll bet they’d prefer higher quality video on YouTube, at least to the level of some of the other video sites already out there.
Unless they decide to do multiple Flash transcodings for each upload, switching from Flash 7′s Sorenson codec to Flash 8′s On2 codec will lock some folks out. Wii users would no longer be able to use YouTube. Linux users would be out in the cold. Basically, any non-Windows, non-Mac platform would be out of luck, thanks to the closed nature of Adobe’s Flash player.
Given YT’s goal of being the lingua franca of web video, throwing out even a small subset of the audience would seem counter-productive.