I Will Have A Million Dollars in the Morning
I was just thinking last night how it’s really long past due that Youtube added support for widescreen videos so they can have more screen space rather than forced letterbox on all 16:9 videos. Well I just looked on the site a moment ago and what do you know, widescreen support!
All the 4:3 stuff (likely the majority of YouTube uploads) are pillarboxed as of now. Any widescreen videos are either windowboxed or still pillarboxed and yet to be corrected to fit the newer size video display. I would assume videos that are being uploaded now may be able to take advantage. And it doesn’t seem like any screen space has been lost on video pages either!
This is really a long-time coming, as now with both the high-quality setting and widescreen, YouTube may finally become a formidable site for watching high bit-rate video (rather than a place to go to for a quick stream where you could give two craps about quality). The subject was on my head yesterday since I was looking for a high quality music video (something from the mid-90s) and it was near impossible to find. stage6 has yet to be replaced in my mind and likely never will. When it was still around, I could imagine going there for that specific music video and finding better quality than most places. Hulu, although high-quality, is mostly just TV shows and lacks the broadness that YouTube has and stage6 had.
Licensing issues have made small-time video sites a mine field and many die out before they even become popular. YouTube has long been stripped of tons of licensed content but it’s fanbase is so large that there’s always some hidden gems to find on there. In addition, a growing number of media sites are making deals to create a presence on YouTube so perhaps one of these days, one could go watch a favorite TV show on YouTube and know without a doubt it’ll still be there a week later. All hail Google?
YouTube’s never failed to amaze me in how they never give up on ways to better the site, although it doesn’t always work out so well. Let’s hope this isn’t another of those changes that they later retract. Bless this day, November 24th, hopefully it’s a sign of good things to come.
