Internet TV Blog

Recently there have been a few announcements of Internet TV sites doing HD Video.

Some of the recent High Definition Video announcements came from: Dailymotion and Vimeo. There’s even ways to do HD quality video on YouTube.

Chris Albrecht is arguing that no one wants HD video on the Internet yet. Chris’ article points out that….

AOL pulled the plug on its HD-like offering last year after low user adoption and CBS was hesitant to jump into HD content, believing that audiences don’t care so much about video quality.

Chris’ article also says…

And in an odd way, Dailymotion’s HD offering may prove the naysayers’ points. The Dailymotion blog concedes:

Word to the wise, however: HD is both bandwidth and processor intensive, so a 1.6 Mbps connection is advised (and dual-cores don’t hurt ;).

In an initial test, I had trouble with one video stopping almost every three seconds. A subsequent video worked fine, though there was still some stuttering.

I think that it’s not that users don’t care about video quality, as CBS states. I think it’s that viewesr want their video to start playing instantly and to play smoothly.

But currently, with HD video, the video takes a long time to download and is jittery when it plays. That’s the real reason HD if failing on these video sharing sites.

Let’s face it… HD Video looks better. If viewers could get HD right now without all the slowness and jittery playing, they’d watch it. (Especially those people who are already watching Internet TV on their big screen TV’s.)

The problem is, with these video sharing sites, you can’t really do that yet. The video takes a long time to download and it’s often jittery when it plays. (Which drives viewers crazy.)

If this situation keeps up, we could see a return to Broadcatching!

Not too long ago, before everyone and his pet cat created their own video sharing site… before YouTube, Blip.tv, Revver, Dailymotion, Veoh, and all the rest… people were getting Online Video using a technique called Broadcatching. (Basically… broadcatching involved pre-fetching the video before you want to watch it. So that when you want to watch it, the video was already on your computer’s hard drive, and playing is instant and smooth.)

Broadcatching may see a new surge of popularity because of HD video.

HD video may push people to primarily get their video using Broadcatching software, like: Miro or iTunes.

Jake Ludington (of Jake Ludington’s MediaBlab) pointed out a good video on how to do HD quality video on YouTube.

Jake adds…

Following the steps in the tutorial… You get a pristine looking video at under 1 minute, down to slightly better than YouTube results at 4 minutes. Apparently over 4 minute videos won’t work.

I don’t think you actually need the tool the guy recommends, you just need to know the right command line hashes for FFMPEG (meaning you should be able to use FFMPEGX or WinFF or SUPER). Licensing a copy of the On2 codec probably wouldn’t hurt either.

If you click the More link in his description for the video, he definitely has a bunch of great looking footage posted (relative to the way other YouTube vids look at least).