High-quality YouTube videos coming soon
YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, speaking at the NewTeeVee Live conference today, confirmed that high-quality YouTube video streams are coming soon. Although YouTube's goal, he said, is to make the site's vast library of content available to everyone …
Context & Ripple Effects
Chen's confirmation at NewTeeVee Live caps a week of groundwork rather than arriving cold: on November 8 YouTube quietly doubled down on upload-side capacity by raising the per-file cap from 100 MB to 1 GB and shipping a multi-file Windows uploader for bulk uploads — exactly the plumbing higher-bitrate streams require. The appearance itself was telegraphed, with NewTeeVee having solicited reader questions for Chen four days earlier.
The quality push also lands mid-identity-crisis for YouTube. October brought the beta launch of its Video Identification content-ID tool alongside pointed commentary accusing the site's copyright regime of being 'The Big Copyright Lie' — while the same month's commentary credited YouTube with cutting the Gordian knot of codecs via Flash video that 'just works.' Chen's announcement tests which identity wins: universal simplicity or broadcast-grade quality.
First-order effects
- Uploaders immediately gain headroom for richer files — the 1 GB limit and desktop uploader mean long-form, higher-bitrate content can now reach YouTube's pipeline without workarounds.
- Viewers face an incoming split between standard and high-quality streams, raising YouTube's bandwidth and storage costs per view on Google's infrastructure bill.
Second-order effects
- Rival video platforms that already courted higher-quality uploads lose their differentiator if YouTube normalizes quality at scale, pushing competition toward features like live video — the open question TechCrunch posed back in June 2007 over who would be 'the YouTube of live video.'
- Publishers using YouTube's custom AdSense-monetized embedded players can carry higher-grade content off-site, strengthening the argument that professional-looking web video belongs on ad-supported embeds rather than downloads.
Third-order effects
- If high quality arrives without breaking the Flash player's 'it just works' universality, the industry's codec-and-compatibility debate shifts from whether web video matches TV to how much bandwidth Google will subsidize to keep it free.
- Better streams plus the Video ID tool point toward YouTube courting rights-holders rather than merely appeasing them — a structural turn from user-generated scruffiness toward a library studios can tolerate.
The trend: Web video is moving from a lowest-common-denominator compromise toward broadcast-grade quality, with YouTube trading rising delivery costs for defensibility against both rivals and rights-holders.