YouTube

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• Google Chrome
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YouTube details ‘Project Butter’ initiative for smoother video in Chrome

Jordan Kahn Nov 10 2015 - 8:37 am PT

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With YouTube video as the motivation, Chrome recently received some enhancements to make the video experience as smooth as possible across devices. Dubbed “Project Butter” (not that Project Butter), YouTube engineers worked together with Chrome engineers to make optimizations to video playback.

YouTube engineers walked us through their thought process with the optimizations in a blog post:

Your device’s screen redraws itself at a certain frame rate. Videos present frames at a certain rate. These rates are often not the same. At YouTube we commonly see videos authored at 24, 25, 29.97, 30, 48, 50, 59.94, and 60 frames per second (fps) and these videos are viewed on displays with different refresh rates – the most common being 50Hz (Europe) and 60Hz (USA)… For a video to be smooth we need to figure out the best, most regular way to display the frames – the best cadence. The ideal cadence is calculated as the ratio of the display rate to frame rate. For example, if we have a 60Hz display (a 1/60 second display interval) and a 30 fps clip, 60 / 30 == 2 which means each video frame should be displayed for two display intervals of total duration 2 * 1/60 second.

Using that math, the team was able to come up with an algorithm that will allow Chrome to auto adjust to the optimal settings based on the display and the quality of the video being streamed. The improvements were introduced with Chrome 44:

In Chrome 44, we re-architected the media and compositor pipelines to communicate carefully about the intent to generate and display. Additionally, we also improved which video frames to pick by using the optimal display count information. With these changes, Chrome 44 significantly improved on smoothness scores across all video frame rates and display refresh rates… Smooth like butter

YouTube has more on the enhancements for video in Chrome 44 in its blog post here.

Google’s original Project Butter debuted with the announcement of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, as an initiative to make the Android experience smoother and more user-friendly. For its purpose, the project was a success — Android 4.4 went on to become one of the most stable and beloved versions of Android yet, and was succeeded by Lollipop, a complete revamp that reinvented Android from the ground up.

As you may know, the current stable release of Chrome is version 46, and version 44 stable was released a few months ago.

• Google
• YouTube
• YouTube Red
• red
• audience

PSA: YouTube Red is now live, and you can sign up for a free trial now

Stephen Hall Oct 28 2015 - 10:08 am PT

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Google introduced the world to its curiously-named YouTube Red service just last week, and mentioned that October 28th would be the day that it launched. Well, today is October 28th, and you can now head over to YouTube.com/red to sign up for the service. Google’s kicking off Red with a one month free trial for all users, after which you’ll be charged $9.99 per month…

With YouTube Red, you’ll get access to a completely ad-free YouTube experience (which alone is an enticing offer for those of us that still want to support content creators), you’ll be able to download videos for offline viewing on a variety of devices, and — one feature that has been much-requested since YouTube hit mobile devices — you’ll be able to keep the app running in the background when your screen is off.

The thing that’s confusing to me about this whole ordeal is that there’s so much convergence of content between Google Play Music and YouTube Red. A Google Play Music Unlimited subscription seems to get you a YouTube Red subscription and vice-versa, so now I have to decide which of the two platforms I will use for music streaming. But I guess that’s pretty typical for Google’s products.

I’m not complaining, so don’t get me wrong. I think it’s pretty nice that Google is making these two services just one monthly bill, and I doubt I ever be willing to pay for both. The reason for that is because there’s just so much content overlap, and I guess that’s the same thing that might make this confusing for the average customer. Either way, I get another free month of Google Play Music Unlimited out of this even if I don’t end up sticking with Red, and that’s fine by me.

https://youtu.be/YL9RetC0ook

• Google
• YouTube
• Ads
• music
• youtube subscription

Report: YouTube will place some content behind paywall when subscription service launches

Cam Bunton Oct 19 2015 - 6:52 am PT

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We’ve read many times over the past months that YouTube is planning to launch a subscription service. The company itself has announced as such, and is already nearly all the way to getting enough partners onboard with the new monetization method. In return for a low monthly fee, likely $10, YouTube wants to give you access to all the videos and music you can manage, and without showing any ads of any kind. Google is planning announce this new service at an event this Wednesday, October 21st.

What Google has said all along, however, is that customers who don’t pay can still watch all their favorite videos, but with the ads (as normal). What it hasn’t stated publicly, is that it may be holding some exclusive content back, for the eyes of subscribers only. In a report from Re/code, it’s rumored that when YouTube kicks off its new paid service, the streaming site will also place content that it funds behind a paywall. Regular non-payers won’t be able to watch it.

It’s unclear when you’ll be able to see the new programming YouTube is announcing. Sources say some of the stuff YouTube is paying for hasn’t been created yet, and won’t be available until 2016. In September, I reported that industry sources expected YouTube to launch its subscription service near the end of this month, though it could slip past 2015.

The timing of YouTube’s planned subscription service launch is still, clearly, up in the air. But it will be interesting see how the streaming platform delivers the service, and how many long-time YT users sign up. Will YouTube be able to tempt enough people to subscribe with its own funded and exclusive content? Those questions remain unanswered for now. Let’s just hope the launch happens sooner rather than later, if only to satisfy my curiosity.

• Android
• YouTube
• Nexus 5
• Nexus 6P
• Nexus

First Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X unboxing videos surface online

Cam Bunton Oct 13 2015 - 12:50 pm PT

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Google announced the Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X at an official press unveiling just a few weeks ago, right before opening up pre-orders for the two newest stock Android devices. It marks the first year that two different Nexus phones have been released at the same time, and it seems the first lot of devices are already landing in the hands of the early adopters.

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• Android
• Google
• YouTube
• countries
• Kazakhstan

YouTube continues global expansion w/ versions of its site in 7 new locales

Stephen Hall Oct 12 2015 - 9:35 am PT

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Google has announced today that the number of countries with local versions of YouTube is growing to 85, with the additional of 7 new territories and countries. As of today, there is now a localized version of the web’s most popular video streaming site in the Adriatics, the Baltics, Bulgaria, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Belarus…

The news comes from Google’s official YouTube blog:

We want to make sure the videos you see when you fire up YouTube are relevant to you, wherever you’re watching. That’s why we’re launching even more local country versions of YouTube, connecting fans with creators in their home countries and giving those creators a way to earn money from their popularity. With the addition of the Adriatics, Baltics, Bulgaria, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Belarus, YouTube now has local versions in 85 countries.

While it’s easy to have a biased perspective on the world when you live in the US, Google says that more than 80% of YouTube’s views come from people outside the US. And with content creators and consumers speaking dozens of languages and creating an unthinkable amount of content, it makes sense to be able to connect to the community in your physical vicinity.

• Android
• YouTube
• gaming
• streaming
• Video Games

YouTube Gaming, Google’s Twitch competitor, purportedly launching tomorrow

Cam Bunton Aug 25 2015 - 1:36 pm PT

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YouTube Gaming, Google’s attempt at taking on Twitch, is allegedly set to launch tomorrow, August 26, according to TechCrunch’s sources. The site will go live at gaming.youtube.com tomorrow in the US and the UK and will act as a central hub where viewers can find and watch people live streaming their own video gameplay.

Google announced that it would be getting in to gaming live-streams a couple of months back and has been working behind the scenes to get its service ready for a public rollout. Once live it will act as a direct competitor to Twitch, an Amazon service which lets gamers stream their gameplay and offer it up to viewers to watch. It’s a huge market to get in to, and one which YouTube clearly has the infrastructure to manage. Just searching through YouTube for game walkthroughs or live-streams should be enough to convince anyone that the game-streaming market is huge.

The questions is: Will YouTube compete with Amazon’s Twitch effectively? Twitch has more than 1.5 million broadcasters and amasses over 100 million visitors every month and cost Amazon nearly $1 billion in September last year. Interestingly, Google itself was an interested party and was bidding in competition with Amazon to buy Twitch last year — at times Google was even believed to have closed the deal. YouTube Gaming will be available to download on Android when it launches.

• Android
• Samsung
• YouTube
• Tech Industry
• Samsung Galaxy

Sprint Galaxy S6 & S6 Edge receiving Samsung Pay, live broadcasting via YouTube, more

Tom Maxwell Aug 24 2015 - 1:36 pm PT

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The service may not be launching until next month, but owners of Samsung’s Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge are now receiving an over-the-air update which includes support for Samsung Pay. The update, which you’ll need approximately 303MB of free storage to install, includes some other additions as well.

For starters, there’s support for live video broadcasting over YouTube, which has been a highly-requested ability from the video hosting platform ever since the launch of the competing Meerkat and Periscope apps. This is possible thanks to WatchMe, an open-source project by Google that allows app developers to integrate with the YouTube Data and YouTube Live Streaming APIs, among others.  There’s also higher quality audio output to Samsung headsets (those new Level On headphones, perhaps?), UI updates, and the usual bug fixes.

Samsung Pay is Samsung’s mobile payments app and service that is different from other solutions from Google and Apple because it includes the ability to pay at nearly any credit card terminal. It does this through the use of MST technology, the same thing used in the magnetic strips on the back of all credit and debit cards.

While Samsung Pay is expected to work in far more places than Android Pay and Apple Pay currently do, Verizon Wireless here in the States is still evaluating whether or not to allow the service onto the Samsung devices it sells, according to a representative from the company speaking to 9to5Google.

The update could take several days to hit devices. You can check manually by visiting Settings > About phone > System updates.