thechromesource – Google Chrome and Chrome OS News and Forum

YouTube Moving to Open Formats?

Posted on 17. Jan, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey in News

Google has owned YouTube since it purchased the company for $1.65 billion in 2006. Since that time, video that is viewed on the web has become more and more popular. In November the site had twelve billion unique videos served up to users. In fact, YouTube’s growth in 2009 is larger than the traffic that goes through the nine other most popular video sites. That’s right. Nine.

One thing that many have observed about YouTube, however, is that the technology used on the site hasn’t really changed since the Google acquisition in 2006. The size of the viewing area has increased somewhat, but the old Flash architecture still remains. But it appears that it may be changing in the near future, one of another movements by Google towards a mobile web for thin client hardware to run on.

Goolge had opened up for suggestions on how to best improve YouTube on Google Product Ideas, and quickly moving to free formats became very popular. So popular that Google cleared out the large amount of free format suggestions and issued a statement:

“We’ve heard a lot of feedback around supporting HTML 5 and are working hard to meet your request, so stay tuned. We’ll be following up when we have more information. We’re answering this idea now because there are so many similar HTML 5 ideas and we want to give other ideas a chance to be seen.”

This was also helped by an ambitious blogger who posted a plea days ago to try to get Google to open up the video formatting to something other than Flash, which is hardware intensive and as of now is experiencing some issues on the Chromium OS project.

So when will we see a change to Youtube? My guess is soon, now that there are other alternatives to using Flash and Microsoft products such as Android and Chrome for example.

HTML 5 will open up the door for richer online video, as well as (if Google allows it) the ability to download YouTube clips. Three dimensional environments are also possible, and you can check out a demo at YouTube’s HTML 5 page.

Tags: android, Chrome, Chrome OS, Flash, Google, HTML 5, YouTube