YouTube appears to be learning a lot of tricks from Hulu. Today they announced that they are going widescreen:

Over the years we’ve heard a lot of feedback from you about what you’d like to change about YouTube, and the size of our video player is always top of mind. That’s why today we’re excited to announce a bigger YouTube player. 

We’re expanding the width of the page to 960 pixels to better reflect the quality of the videos you create and the screens that you use to watch them. This new, wider player is in a widescreen aspect ratio which we hope will provide you with a cleaner, more powerful viewing experience. And don’t worry, your 4:3 aspect ratio videos will play just fine in this new player. 

As always, we welcome your feedback and encourage you to share your thoughts with us on this exciting, new change happening for all videos on YouTube. 

This is a smart move, but the implementation could be better.

Most people have fairly large monitors now and this will prep the site for showing more HD content. 

But while it may be a smart long-term move, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t angered users that don’t like the way the new player displays many user-generated videos. Here are a few typical comments:

• I don’t like the player. Ok, widescreen movies look great on it, but everything else looks terrible. It would be better if I have an option to choose between the widescreen and the old player.
• This really should be optional. Especially since my (admittedly really old and terrible) computer could run the original sized player perfectly without any problems, but with this new player even the 4:3 videos slow down and can’t be watched without obnoxious hiccups. It’s not like a bigger size option wasn’t there for people in the first place. Hello fullscreen! I really hope you’ll change it back or at least give an option between the two player sizes.
• Meh, intentions were good, implementation horrid! Most of the vids have black bars left and right which IMHO look like poo! Especially poor are the people who uploaded 16:9 formatted vids!