Youtube on AppleTV

I found this link via Cinematech. Steve Jobs announces that AppleTV will start streaming Youtube videos. This is interesting as at last, there is a simple hardware way of getting Youtube content onto a TV. A few weeks ago, a hack was announced for the AppleTV that allowed you to watch Youtube vids on a TV. However the problem was that you would be limited to browsing the most popular vids. The What's not clear at the moment is how these videos will be stored and played back.

AppleTV is quicktime based, and the above plug in uses a hack to playback Youtube's FLV files. Will the Youtube for AppleTV files be re-encoded in quicktime? Will they be available at (potentially) higher quality (say comparable to Revver which hosts vids at 480*360 for 4:3 and 600*360 for 16:9 at around 700Kbs?) Steve Jobs is right when he says that the limiting factor for Youtube vids is the quality of the original footage (I made a similar point in my previous post). However that's not the case with all material.

The Apple press release (primarily for a new bigger capacity model of the AppleTV) states "Thousands of the most current and popular YouTube videos will be available on Apple TV at launch in mid-June, with YouTube adding thousands more each week until the full YouTube catalog is available this fall." this staggered roll out implies something other than Youtube's website being plugged into iTunes.

SO if higher quality Quicktime files ARE able to be posted on websites, will non-AppleTV users be able to access them (other than via hacking) - will the content owner be able to offer higher quality QT versions of their clips for embedding? One thought: Youtube is now offering revenue sharing with certain content producing partners. Will these partners be able to have higher quality clips than Joe or Jo Public?