In a small gathering of press this morning, YouTube unveiled YouTube XL- a new service that brings your favorite cat falling off stuff and shoddy folk cover videos straight to your TV!

While online computer-to-tv streaming services and Hulu and Boxee offer content optimized for TV, YouTube videos often didn’t even really do well in monitor full-screen mode. But YouTube XL changes that, optimizing content for viewing even on huge-screen TVs.

Although YouTube XL lacks some features of regular YouTube, (most notably the comments, yay!) YouTube XL supports playlists, HD video and even has an application called Gmote for Android phones. (Where’s the iPhone love at, YouTube?) And unlike Hulu Desktop, which needs a computer to rock and roll, you can use YouTube XL on devices with a browser such as the Wii, XBox and PS3- making the interface friendly for a larger group of users.

Wanna take it for a spin? Go on!

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3. Cool New Tools For YouTube

Splicd: The Simple YouTube Editor

Splicd lets you decide what’s worth watching on YouTube and splice out the rest before sharing it. Let’s say you want to point out a specific piece of a video without forcing your friends to watch the entire thing. You just go to Splicd, put in the video URL, and tell it what segment you want — i.e. from 0:44 to 0:59 — and it gives you a new URL that will show only that piece of the clip.

We gave it a whirl with the last Microsoft-Seinfeld ad. At four-and-a-half minutes, it was a bit long for some. So we picked one scene — from 1:26 to 1:39 — and spliced it here.

Our vote: Splicd couldn’t be simpler to use; there’s really nothing to it. It could prove to be quite useful for sharing, since often we want to relay just one specific part of a video to someone and end up having to tell them to “watch closely about a minute in!” The only downside to it is that as of now, the service doesn’t offer an embedding option for the spliced clip, so you have to provide a URL to pass it along. If it could find a way to deliver embed codes too, that’d open up a whole new kind of usage for posting specific content on blogs and other Web sites. Nonetheless, it’s well-worth a try.

Mixtube: The Muxtape of YouTube

Mixtube brings the idea of Muxtape, 8tracks, and other similar playlist sharing services to YouTube. The idea behind it makes sense: Most songs can be found on YouTube without any real hassle. You can generally get the original recorded version in the video form as well as any number of alternate live versions from concert performances. Why not use that as a content database for making mixes?

The first thing you see on Mixtube’s front page is a list of popular and recently viewed playlists. You can click through any to hear the tunes, or do a custom search for a specific band or type of list.

Creating your own list is easily enough done, too. You just use Mixtube’s interface to add URLs to the YouTube videos you want, then arrange them in the order you prefer.

The service seems to work fairly smoothly. When you’re inside a playlist, you don’t even realize the song is tied into YouTube unless you scroll down to the bottom of screen. The video plays in a small box there with a caption: “To comply with YouTube TOS (pardon the ugliness)”

Our vote: Not a bad way to listen to songs and create your own lists — and with a pretty extensive collection to choose from, too. There’s also no reason this would have to be limited to music, either. One could just as easily create playlists for any type of YouTube content in the same fashion, which presents some interesting mash-up possibilities.

Seen any other cool new YouTube tools pop up lately? Feel free to leave a comment and share.

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