The video quality at PrestoSports has just gotten a lot better.  About four times better.  Here is a new video uploaded since we've upgrade the quality.  Be sure to try the video in full screen mode to really see the difference.

Ten years ago, video quality was a technology issue.  Computers were not fast enough, and multiple companies competed for how Internet video streaming should work.  Since then, the software to send and receive videos have became standardized on everyone's computer.

Five years ago, video quality was a user adoption issue.  Your site could show higher quality video, but you risked alienating some users who have slow Internet connections.  Since then, digital cable and fiber optics have become much more the norm and users have also become accustomed to waiting a bit for a YouTube video to load.

While today technology and user adoption are still considerations, the biggest factor to determine video quality is economics.  Sending video costs money. Bandwidth refers to how fast your Internet connection is, and just like buying a faster connection at home costs more money, sending videos that use more bandwidth cost more money.

It works out to only a few cents every time someone watches a clip, but it adds up.  YouTube is estimated to have spent $300 million to stream videos in 2009 and has yet to turn a profit.

We used to convert to the video quality YouTube used 1-2 years ago, which was at 200kbps (kilobytes per second).  This would work for people with DSL type connections, basically what people had before high speed broadband.

In the past year, YouTube began offering "HD" quality video.  This is streaming video at 900kbps, which is the low end of high speed broadband.  YouTube soon thereafter revamped to a size rating system: 240p (the old quality), 360p (the new default), 480p, 720p.

This past year, we received a lot of criticism because YouTube had gone from 240p to 360p, while we were still using 240p.  We have decided to leap-frog YouTube and go directly to a default of 480p.

We also decided to increase the maximum video clip to 10 minutes.  Customers can pay to stream longer videos for a nominal cost.

The changes will took effect with version 3.9.5, which was released to everyone the week of July 12th.  Hope you're pleased with the results!