Sneaky Youtube rolling out HD?

Techcrunch today posted an article discussing what looks to be the roll out of HD content on Youtube. No announcement has been made by Youtube who also updated the look of their site and went widescreen within the last few weeks. The chatter has been that Youtube may be evaluating HD worthy (content that meets the HD resolution requirements) content and offering it as an alternative version to the standard definition. Many consider Hulu a fierce competitor for Youtube which may be a partial catalyst for all of the recent updates. Not by coincidence, the pocket video camera makers Flip Video recently launched their Flip Mino HD and have been heavily advertising on Youtube over the last few weeks. So does it look like it is finally happening? The biggest video site on the web making moves like this should most certainly prompt many to take advantage of the platform and test the waters by buying the much more reasonably priced HD cameras now available. In addition to the HD news, it looks like there is also a new feature within comments that takes the common reference to a specific time in the video and turns it into an interactive link. Within a comment just write the time you want to reference like this “1:45″ or “0:45″ and it will automagically become a link that springs the video directly to that point in the timeline. What do you think of all the changes?

Youtube in HD now?