YouTube HD Is On The Way

They are going to need bigger trucks to carry all that data through the tubes of the internet though. That's right, Mr. Chen said the other day at the NewTeeVee conference that they were in fact working on HD YouTube videos.

The biggest problem though was that they are trying not to have buffer times that drive away viewers, which is hard to do with limited bandwidth. Sure, in most places the Internet access speeds have caught up to a point where loading a YouTube video is quick and painless, but taking that same video HD, even if its just 720p, would multiply the amount of data needing to be loaded even to start the film, by a lot.

Video processing times are already fairly outrageous on YouTube, and trying to stretch those same servers to do it with HD content would be crazy. Your 5 minute HD YouTube clip would take an hour to upload and a day to process, those aren't real numbers, they are exaggerated, but they probably aren't too far off.

YouTube HD Coming Soon [via techcrunch]