The Age of Grainy Web Videos Has Come to an End: YouTube Turns on HD

Just about three weeks ago, we reported that YouTube was testing high-definition videos, and today it seems like this feature has been officially released. A large number of videos that fulfilled YouTube’s criteria for HD encoding now sport a ‘watch in HD’ button instead of the old ‘watch in high quality.’ We have not seen any official statement from YouTube about this yet, but you can already find a lot of HD videos on YouTube now if you do a search for ‘HD’ on the site.

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Until today, you could only see these HD versions if you added "&fmt=22" to a YouTube URL and it was almost impossible to know which video would work in HD.

As we pointed out in our earlier story about these HD videos, the quality is amazing and rivals that of some of YouTube’s closest competitors like Vimeo. However, it is also worth noting that you need a relatively fast broadband connection to watch these videos without constant stuttering and buffering.

Just in the last couple of weeks, YouTube has been rolling out a wide variety of new features, including the new wide-screen format (which was clearly in preparation for this release) and the addition of over 25k new songs from music licensing firm Rumblefish to its AudioSwap feature.

Game-Changer

These new HD videos, however, are clearly a game-changer. Web video always had the name of having relatively sub-standard video quality and being generally grainy and hard to watch (and YouTube especially). Now, you could easily put up a screen-cast on YouTube in HD, or film a video with your new Flip MinoHD and have it seen in its full 720p glory.

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YouTube Adds 25k New Songs to Publishing Tool

YouTube is announcing today that video publishers will now have more than 25,000 new songs to choose between for their video soundtracks. The songs are provided by independent music licensing firm Rumblefish and are available using YouTube’s AudioSwap feature.

Rumblefish is a Portland, Oregon based company that provides music for film makers, marketing firms and others. Is it just a lot of elevator music? Searching through the company’s own online catalog, MusicLicensingStore.com, our first impression was relatively positive. You can even search for well-known band names and get suggestions for similar sounding unknown groups.

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How It Works

AudioSwap was launched as an experimental feature in February of 2007, with a fairly limited selection of songs separated by genre. If YouTube gives AudioSwap more prominent placement on the site, we suspect this could be a very big hit. The feature replaces the entire audio track of a video with the selected tune, an approach that will admittedly suit some people better than others.

We hope that YouTube will add a search function similar to the one on the Rumblefish site; the project would get a lot more traction if users could search for big names in music and get recommendations of similar bands they haven’t heard of before.

Music licensing is an active if complicated market online, with major labels doing deals over the past year with both YouTube and MySpace. Video publishers interested in getting off the beaten path of mainstream music and doing so legally at no cost to themselves could find the newly expanded AudioSwap of great interest.

Following on the heals of YouTube’s Global Symphony project, the Rumblefish announcement is another example of how much room for innovation still exists in online video.

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