It’s hard to believe, but YouTube has been around for 20 years already, serving up some of the best streaming content you’ll find on the internet. And while most of your content comes in at 1080p or above nowadays, there was a time when quality was locked at 240p.
So, as you can imagine, trying to watch these older relics is quite challenging now, especially compared to what we’re used to. Luckily, Google is stepping in to solve this problem, utilizing AI magic in order to upscale 240p content to 1080p. The feature from YouTube will be called “Super resolution” and will be something creators can opt in or out of.
Is this what viewers want?
Credit: YouTube
YouTube shares that while videos can be upscaled to 1080p using AI, creators will have the power to keep the original resolution, along with the original files. Videos that have been altered using AI will show the “Super resolution” label in the options when you want to select the video quality.
YouTube also shares that this is just the beginning, with the eventual goal of upscaling lower-quality videos to 4K. In addition, YouTube will now offer higher-quality thumbnail images as well. While the previous thumbnail size was limited to 2MB, creators will now be able to upload thumbnail images as large as 50MB.
As you can imagine, this is a pretty big deal considering that thumbnails are the first users see when searching for content. Even more interesting is that YouTube also shares that it has begun testing higher resolution videos on the platform with certain creators. It’s unclear what resolution will be made available, but going above 4K could have benefits for certain types of content.
YouTube has also changed the way content is seen on TVs, offering viewers a better experience that will deliver “immersive previews on the homepage,” and it will also offer “contextual search on TVs.” YouTube will also make shopping from your couch much easier with new QR codes that will allow users instant access to items being shown on screen from their phone.
For the most part, these are some interesting updates coming to YouTube. Naturally, we’ll hear more about these features once they start rolling out to users. It’ll be interesting to see just how good these upscaled videos look on real-life examples, and how far the platform will push video quality in the near future.
