4K has been around for a while on YouTube and a few months ago they added 48/60fps support for HD content – also called HFR (high frame rate). YouTube is now taking steps to combine the two for buttery-smooth 4K video.
YouTube shows the way
Innovation in video technology is no longer led by TV broadcasters or physical disc formats. Instead, online services such as Netflix and YouTube are showing the way and have both moved to 4K resolution some time ago.
And now YouTube takes the next step. There is no official announcement, but TechCrunch has discovered six videos in a playlist created by "YouTube Developers". All six videos can be streamed in beautiful 4K resolution at 60 frames per second.
Your PC will likely struggle to keep up as it has no hardware support for VP9 decoding that Google/YouTube believes is the future. But this is not intended for your PC. This is intended for Ultra HD TVs. In just a couple of weeks, the first Ultra HD TVs with Android TV will hit the market with hardware support for VP9. YouTube is clearly a major component of Google’s plan to enter your living room.
You cannot yet upload your own videos in 4K/60fps, but YouTube is ready, so we are just waiting for the official word. We have embedded one of the videos below. If you want to see all of them check out the playlist here.
