All the latest televisions have embraced this format, and now YouTube (sort of) has, as well: video search results are being displayed in a widescreen ratio. It’s not clear when this feature might make the jump to the videos themselves, however.
“While perusing YouTube last night, I noticed the thumbnails for all the YouTube videos had all of a sudden switched from the regular standard dimensions to more of a widescreen size,” reports InsideGoogle’s Nathan Weinberg.
“While the rest of the interface hasn’t really changed to take advantage of the shorter thumbnails, and these are widescreen thumbnails of non-widescreen videos, it would seem to indicate that YouTube is finally looking at doing actual widescreen, especially considering devices, like the iPhone, which view YouTube videos on widescreens,” he continues. And we all know that Googlers love Apple products – it turns out that a third of Google’s Australian employees own more than one iPod.
“It would make sense for YouTube to finally get the player to fit the videos, and not waste space on black bars,” Weinberg concludes near the end of his post.
In the comments section over at Gizmodo, readers were quick to voice their support for such a move. Also, compared to some of the other nifty tricks Google has pulled off in recent days, converting video displays from squares to rectangles shouldn’t be a big deal.
