Has anyone else noticed the rather significant change to when you embed a YouTube video on your website or blog? Before, it was a rather static application that showed you the video and that was about it. Now, they’ve implemented an Apple and/or Vista-like interface, so to speak, when you roll your mouse over the playing video.
Related videos are shown as thumbnails near the bottom of the screen, and they enlarge a bit when you run your mouse cursor over them (kind of like the taskbar at the bottom of Mac OS X). You also see the titles and ratings of each of these videos. Check out the example below of the newly announced iPhone-competing HTC Touch. This new interface only pops up when you start playing the video.
UPDATE: And now it’s gone. I guess the development team at YouTube was doing a little experimenting last night.
I also noticed this last night… Well, since now Google owns them, I guess they’re using Google’s method of doing little “devolpment tests” and giving a few blocks of random people the new features or look.
Oh, now I see a “Menu” button on it and when you click it you get the related Videos and also “Embed” and “URL” buttons.
Cool. 😀
Too bad.. I didnt read your update until I saw the video and found that there was nothing new in it
Hmm, it seems in Google Reader, instead of the Menu button, there’s a share button, but here it’s a Menu button… Interesting.
I don’t think the changes you saw will be gone for long. That’s the direction they’re moving. They have millions of embedded videos across the web and they need to figure out how to get more of the viewers of those videos back to YouTube.com or serve some ads to them.
What I like about the new player is that if the viewer clicks on one of the videos at the end, it plays in the same player. Almost all of the other large video sites send the user to their site (when clicking any in-video link at the end of the video) and leaves yours.