YouTube Goes Widescreen Today, Users Still Unhappy

Today we are seeing YouTube introducing the biggest change to the interface of its video player in a very long time with widescreen format for videos arriving. In fact, the size of the video player has probably been the biggest concern of the users demanding something that could let you actually watch and enjoy the videos instead of trying to understand exactly what was going on in that small space dedicated to the video on YouTube so the team seems to address a problem here.

YouTube blog has announced “a bigger YouTube player”. What they have done was increasing the width of the page to 960 pixels which now provides more space for the video player itself and makes it work with the widescreen aspect ratio (16:9).

At that the usual 4:3 videos are promised to fit the new player just fine. But actually there are already people commenting on YouTube blog post mentioning that they have noticed reduced quality of their standard 4:3 videos played in the new player. But I have to admit that this may very well be subjective and not everyone will agree to this opinion.

But the bigger concern must be that there are already many users not happy with having to watch the large black space when watching smaller videos in the larger player and suggesting that the player used for every particular video should ideally be selected depending on the video size when uploading this video. I am not sure how realistic this is but I have a feeling that either the YouTube team decided it was not realistic to let people choose how their uploaded videos should be displayed or they think that videos will be only uploaded in the widescreen format from now on and all the new content on the site will fit the new player just fine with users getting accustomed to having to watch an occasional old video with the wide black space in the player anyway.