Even if it didn’t seem like a slow end of the news week, this would be a big headline. At VidCon last night, YouTube announced that the internet’s biggest video site will soon be adding support for videos that will play back at 48 and 60 frames per second.

Currently, YouTube plays videos back at up to 30 FPS. While that’s great for bandwidth, the growth of high framerate video, such as HD TV, Peter Jackson’s 48 FPS 3D Hobbit movies and video game footage, has made their standard 30 FPS playback seem a bit outdated.

While a date for the launch of higher framerate videos wasn’t announced, it’s supposed to be coming in the next few months.

One thing that you often see when it comes to arguments over the framerates of videos and video games. Many people believe that anything greater than 30 FPS is not perceivable to the human eye. I can’t count the number of frames that are displayed in a second but going from playing BioShock Infinite on PS3 at 30 FPS to PC at 60 FPS, I could tell that the gameplay was smoother and it looked better as a result. So while you can’t count the FPS, you can see that a higher framerate looks better. The same will be true of high FPS YouTube videos.

Also likely important to some of your favourite YouTubers, YouTube also announced that they will soon start rolling out a donation feature to channels that sign up. YouTube are basically trying to replace the crowdfunding, such as Patreon, and PayPal donations that a number YouTubers currently use to support themselves when ads fall short.

Along with these two features, YouTube also announced that a new mobile Creator Studio app will be launching soon, the audio library will be updated with sound effects and credits features will be enhanced.

While I’m not sure how well all of these features will go over, I’m fairly certain that we won’t hear anyone who is active on YouTube, either as a content creator or consumer, complaining about the better video playback. I’m looking forward to it, that’s for sure.

Source: YouTube Creators

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