Amazon today announced Amazon Video Direct, a new service that will see it go head to head with YouTube as it allows independent content creators to upload content and get paid.

The service is similar to Amazon’s model with Kindle Direct Publishing for e-books, allowing independent content creators to upload their own content for consumption by users alongside Amazon’s other video content.

And creators will get to choose how they are paid, either from advertising and royalties based on the popularity of the content, or by making videos available to buy or rent through Amazon. Creators will also have the option of making the content available to all Amazon customers under the ad-supported model, or to collect royalties by making it available just to Prime subscribers or in a Prime video add-on subscription.

Amazon also has a fund for creators that will see it hand out a million dollars per month to the 100 top titles, a little bit of incentive for content creators:

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An update rolling out to the YouTube Android app revamps the upload workflow on mobile and makes it much more convenient to add a video to the service. The most immediate visual change is the video icon that replaces the generic file upload icon on the FAB in the Home tab.

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Update: Google says that the issue has now been fixed and limits have been reapplied.

The new Google Photos service saw its launch last month at Google I/O 2015, and its announcement came with much fanfare thanks to its “unlimited” storage option—which lets you store as many photos and videos as you want for free as long as you’re willing to sacrifice some amount of quality. Now, it looks like some users who have tried to take advantage of this offer are actually hitting an invisible limit… expand full story

If you’re a user of Google Play Music, you probably know that you can store your own music on Google’s servers for streaming from your various devices, but now Google has announced that the amount of songs that you can store for free has been increased, up to 50,000 songs from 20,000. While many of Google’s competitors charge for this kind of service, Google has long offered the ability to store several thousand songs for free—and now they’re upping the limit.

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While YouTube remains the gold standard for uploading videos online, a new study finds that its presence on Facebook is increasingly declining as page owners opt to upload more video directly to the social network over sharing YouTube embeds. The latest research from social media analytics company Socialbakers reveal that, in November, the number of Facebook videos uploaded directly to the site overtook the number of YouTube videos on Facebook for the first time ever. expand full story

Mobile media player Plex for Android has been updated today with support for automatic photo uploads from the camera roll. The feature requires a subscription to the Plex Pass service. The updated app allows users to automatically upload all photos from the camera roll to the Plex library for access on other devices…

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Google’s Play Music service previously required installing the Music Manager app to upload music to the cloud service on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Today that changes as Google adds the ability to drag-and-drop your music collection to upload it directly through the browser within the Google Play Music web interface. It’s still in “lab” beta mode, but you can easily enable it:

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Google announced today on the YouTube Creator blog that it is today rolling out new features for sharing videos on YouTube, Google+, and elsewhere. Now, when uploading a video to YouTube and sharing it directly with social networks, YouTube will allow you to customize the message displayed alongside your video, as highlighted in the image above. Google explained:

Now, when you upload your videos to YouTube, you can write your own post to your fans… Where will this post appear? In YouTube feeds, the text will be merged into the upload feed item (exactly the same as if you were to upload a video, then make a channel post about the same video, but without the extra effort).  This also works with the scheduled publishing feature, offering you even greater convenience… As the video and post will be shared to your other connected social accounts as well, you no longer have go to each site to manually customize a post for each video.

Google also noted that it would add users’ public YouTube videos to the Videos tab on their Google+ page if they have opted in to connect the two accounts: expand full story