Google seems to be obsessed with minimalism at the moment. Not content with fading away most elements of its homepage, it is also continually tinkering with YouTube to make everything but the video as unobtrusive and streamlined as possible.
YouTube Redesign
YouTube’s video pages have been given a major makeover in the last few months. What started as an experimental new look on TestTube, YouTube’s ideas incubator, last December, started being rolled out in January, with even more changes occurring in February.
The overall idea of the redesign was one of minimalism, with everything Google considered non-essential being removed. New features were also added, with video queuing and video comments integrated into the text comments two major new features.
But while the pages which framed and contained the videos were given a makeover, the actual video player was left alone. Until now.
Video Player Redesign
A new version of YouTube’s Flash video player has started to roll out across the whole site. For now, videos with ads or embedded in websites won’t be affected, but all videos should have the new player within a few weeks. It can be seen in full glory on this video, amongst others.
Minimalism again seems to be the main focus of the redesign, with the emphasis put on the video content itself.
The progress bar is now semi-transparent and actually shrinks if left alone. The pause/play button is also less conspicuous. The rest of the video options are now underneath the video, and the volume controls expand horizontally rather than vertically so as not to obscure the video.
Extraneous buttons have disappeared if the features such as captions or annotations aren’t available. Right-clicking on the video brings up the usual options but also now includes a Show Video Info option which displays the resolution, size, bit rate, and other geeky details about the current clip.
Conclusions
This may seem like a minor update, and in many ways it is. But it’s important to remember that YouTube serves up in excess of one billion video views a day, and that’s a lot of eyes which rely on the YouTube video player. So it has to be good, and this redesign certainly makes it better.
[Via NewTeeVee]
