The surprise (not!) announcement came from YouTube co-founder Steve Chen at the NewTeeVee Live conference today where he was invited to give a speech.

What do you know? It turns out that the videos uploaded this far by the users are actually stored in the original format and size. That's good news indeed, once the new player and project are out in the wild the old poor quality videos will be replaced by the original files except for the ones that really are of poor quality such as 320x240 of course.

The project I mentioned above is the upgrade of the old "making the site's vast library of content available to anyone" idea because it only requires a fairly low bitrate stream as opposed to the high-end requirements in place at the moment. The new player is said to be able to determine the speed of the viewer's Internet connection and serve the videos talking that into consideration. That would be interesting to see, wouldn't it?

Rafe Nederman of news.com on the topic: "…because the need to buffer the video before it starts playing will change the experience. Hence the experiment, rather than just a rapid rollout of this technology. On stage, he said the current resolution of YouTube videos has been "good enough" for the site up till now. Chen told me that he expects that high-quality YouTube vids will be available to everyone within three months."

Another mention that Chen made and was pretty ambiguous about was that of introducing the possibility to upload videos from the mobile phone but not the way users have been able to do it until now, via MMS, or at least that's what I understood.

Is the new player and recently announced increasing of the quality of services the answer to Hulu? By my calculations, both will be released at about the same time for the general public.