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Everoyone's favorite video site has new features!
Internet behemoth YouTube added a few new features to its website this week. Videos over 10 minutes now provide two long-awaited options: Theater View and Lights Off. Theater View stretches the videos widescreen, dims the background of your screen around the video to a dark gray, and dresses the sides of the video with red curtains. Lights Off, an option pioneered by the DivX Webplayer when it came out, dims the rest of the screen, making the video far easier to see.
YouTube has been quietly adding other features to its videos. Annotations and high quality also enhance the video viewing experience. All these features come at the cost of more advertisements on the site, manifesting themselves as banner ads on the side of the site and pop-ups which scroll across the bottom of the video.
These additions are transitioning the site into a more mainstream, commercialized vehicle for its community-generated content. Providing these options to directors and producers present more opportunities for users to generate more quality, professional videos in the future.
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