It's about time. YouTube co-founder Steve Chen told those attending the NewTeeVee Live conference today that YouTube will be streaming high-quality videos in about three months. Webware says the service is "testing a player that detects the speed of the viewer's Net connection and serves up higher-quality video if viewers want it."

Streaming video requires a lot of bandwidth, so in order to make the site's content available to everyone, they have to stream it at a fairly low bit rate. The resolution is not stellar, but for most of us, being able to watch videos quickly takes precedence over video quality.

Chen also told Webware that videos uploaded to YouTube have been stored in their native resolution, so once this new player rolls out, high-quality videos will be available immediately.

The video sharing site currently asks users to upload videos in MPEG-4 format, at a 640 x 480 resolution, even though videos are encoded into low-resolution Flash files and resized to a 320 x 240 resolution.

This is actually great news for YouTubers, and personally I'm glad the company isn't making us wait another year or two for this type of upgrade. Yay for YouTube!