YouTube is now broadcasting clips in a widescreen format, and has just recently turned on HD for videos that meet the standard.

I’ve got some pretty quick broadband and am not noticing any lag, but others are reporting that the HD videos can load rather slow on less powerful networks.

So is this the next step towards the inevitable moment when Google begins putting premium content on YouTube and charging users for it? As quality and broadband speeds juice up, that moment gets closer and closer.

Here’s a good video that demonstrates the new HD YouTube. To embed in HD, take the embed code, paste it, and add &ap=%2526fmt%3D22 to the end of the two URLs in the code.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 7th, 2008 at 9:50 pmand is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.