[Update 12/04/08: YouTube now allows for HD streaming. and
YouTube has enabled Widescreen embeds.

Updated 11/24/08: YouTube defaults to 16:9 player format, but what does that mean for the web video industry?]

YouTube’s been going under some mega changes so far this year and now they’ve updated their new player to resize itself to true widescreen resolution. For right now that only pro’s that I can notice between the new widescreen player versus the older player is that if there are widescreen black bars the majority of them will be cut off.

Is this really all that newsworthy? I say no, but the question is why does YouTube find it necessary to release a widescreen format player? There’s got to be something else that this new form of a player can offer that the old one didn’t. Hopefully they’ll let us know what exactly that is soon enough.

Right now because their new player does not embed onto third party sites we can’t show you the differences directly within this post. You can see an example here. Make sure to turn on and off the old/new player to see the differences.

I’m good at photoshop.