U.S President-elect Barack Obama"s ChangeDotGov Channel on YouTube has become the first channel to receive the download video option from YouTube. Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford Law School professor noticed this feature this weekend in a weekly address by Obama. The videos with the download option can be downloaded in a High-quality MPEG4, H.264 format. These download links are not available for any other normal user accounts and channels in YouTube and doesn"t show up in embedded videos.
Till now YouTube has allowed users to watch videos by streaming online. Even though dozen of other tools (VideoDownloadX, Keep Vid, VidGrab) allow video downloads from YouTube, nothing will make it so simple as clicking the Click to download option from YouTube.
There is no official word yet from YouTube whether this feature will be made available to other accounts. But this feature may soon become available to those who do not mind their personal videos being downloaded. If so, next comes the question on how YouTube will handle the download of copyrighted videos and also whether will there be different video formats available for download.