Your Awful Videos, In Stunning 1080p

YouTube is rolling out a video upgrade to its users — over the next few days, the company said on its official blog, 1080p video will be available for viewing. The site currently tops out at 720p, which is 1,280 x 720 pixels. 1080p video has a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080.

Increasingly gone are the days when we could all complain that Web video looks crummy and lives in a tiny box when viewed on a big-screen TV. Most large HDTVs sold these days have a 1080p native resolution. As we'll discuss next week on All Tech Considered, our options for viewing Web content on our TVs seem to increase by the day and this is certainly one way YouTube plans to stay in that loop.

Of course, videos shot on camera phones are still going to look like garbage, so don't expect the 1080p magic wand to improve the quality of content that already looks terrible at lower resolutions. For videos uploaded at 1080p, however, you'll be able to fill up that big screen as soon as you can figure out how to get that computer to interface with that HDTV. Good luck to you.

(My favorite response about it so far is the Christian Science Monitor's headline which reads, in part, "Um, sure.")

Below is a sample 1080p video from YouTube (much smaller than 1080p, of course, but you can click on it to get to the larger version). My computer monitor won't even display it at 1080p because mine tops out at 1,680 x 1,050.