YouTube Gets Facelift

Will YouTube ever be worth the $1.6 billion Google paid for it? It's easily the most-watched video site in the world, but translating ubiquity into money has been a lot harder than anyone thought. Advertisers, it turns out, don't want to place ads next to grainy films of your cat throwing up a hairball. Viacom's $1 billion copyright-infringement lawsuit has been a massive headache, and Google's imperious attitude toward copyright in general has left Hollywood film and television studios either too angry or too scared to enter into video-posting partnerships. And even when Google does get a partner to post movies or TV shows, navigating around YouTube is next to impossible, and no one can find what movies there are. As a result, YouTube's rival Hulu, with its easy terrain and plethora of professional content courtesy of NBC and Fox, is creeping up on YouTube. And YouTube knows it.

Maybe that's why Google struck back yesterday, launching two new important YouTube features. The first is YouTube's new high-definition option, which switches to wide screen and features much higher resolution than the usual fare. Since most videos are not HD-formatted, YouTube has set up an "HD Videos Area," where users can search for the highest-quality films the site has to offer. Low-resolution video has been one of the issues keeping advertisers from throwing money at the site, and this may help turn things around.

YouTube's second initiative tackles the site's maddening lack of navigability. Even though companies like CBS and MGM have signed deals to post feature-length shows on YouTube, no one can find them, thanks to the peculiar architecture of the Web site. Now, YouTube has started collecting movies, music, and news on three separate landing pages. The news page will offer video broadcasts of breaking news, and the music and movies pages will showcase the most popular songs and feature-length films, broken down by category. Users will still find themselves lost in YouTube's architecture most of the time, but at least it's a start.