I’m feeling quite behind the TV times of late. My dad bought my daughter a small Vizio LCD TV for her birthday not long ago. I realized last week when I had to flee the living room and my big screen plasma due to a Glee marathon that her little TV looks better than mine. I need to upgrade my TV. If you have the scratch to update your TV to a fancy new 4K unit, you will be glad to hear this.
YouTube has signed up 19 partners that will be helping it to roll out its 4K streaming service during CES 2014, which kicks off next week. The YouTube 4K service will use Google’s own new codec called VP9. This codec will be a good thing for all of us, even if you don’t expect to adopt a 4K TV any time soon.
The reason that the VP9 codec is good for us all is that YouTube says it will help reduce the data requirements needed for normal HD video as well. How much data will it save you? YouTube execs say VP9 could cut the amount of data required to stream a HD video in half. That means YouTube won’t eat so much of your monthly bandwidth allotment, and videos will stream more smoothly on lower bandwidth connections.
[via GigaOm]
