YouTube

Earlier this year Google unveiled its new YouTube Gaming service to rival Amazon-owned video game streaming site Twitch after several months of speculation. Today, Google has released the version of the YouTube Gaming app for Android, albeit in an early “Creator Preview” form. The changelog of the app reveals that the app is capable of many of the features previously announced.

Expand
Expanding
Close

YouTube announced a new plan today to finally get rid of the well-known “301+” issue that affected popular videos on the site.

As has been explained by the company in the past, the process of verifying the legitimacy of views on popular videos often meant that when a video hit 300 views, the counter would freeze at “301+” while the rest of the views were verified.

Expand
Expanding
Close

After testing a new desktop web player back in April, based on the company’s mobile apps, YouTube is now rolling it out to all users. Check out more of the updated UI below … 
Expand
Expanding
Close

Hank Green, creator of VlogBrothers and other YouTube channels, has written a Medium post in which he accuses Facebook of cheating, lying and condoning content theft in its efforts to persuade content creators to switch platform.

Facebook says it’s now streaming more video than YouTube. To be able to make that claim, all they had to do was cheat, lie, and steal.

The most damning claim Green makes is that Facebook effectively lies about the number of views videos receive on the platform by counting them while many people are simply scrolling past … 
Expand
Expanding
Close

Yesterday I wrote about the general availability of Google Contributor, a service through which consumers can choose to be billed an amount between $2-10 on a recurring monthly basis in exchange for seeing less display advertisements around the web.

Contributor is an interesting service that I likened to the Patreon and Kickstarter crowdfunding platforms, but that could make the web browsing experience a little less frustrating. Here’s how I concluded that post:
Expand
Expanding
Close

The great unraveling of Google+ as a fiber connecting all of Google’s products continues. Who’s disbanding this time? Well, basically all of the Google ecosystem.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Following the VidCon keynote address by Susan Wojcicki earlier this evening, the YouTube CEO took a couple of minutes to sit with BroadbandTV CEO Shahrzad Rafati in a fireside chat and answer questions submitted by the community to social networks including Twitter and Instagram. Of note were comments on the yet-to-be released video subscription service, the way in which YouTube measures success, and Wojcicki’s opinion on YouTube stars experimenting with other platforms like Vine and linear TV.

Expand
Expanding
Close

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki just stepped off the ballroom stage here at the 6th annual VidCon, the four day convention evolving around all things web video — although it takes some real effort to see past the hoards of teenage fandom. What she had to say was, well, a lot of what we already know about YouTube past, present, and future. The highlights? A “mobile, mobile, mobile” strategy starting with a new mobile app designed from the ground-up based on community feedback, even more tools for creators to make their lives easier and bring them closer to their audiences, and virtual reality.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Google today announced in a blog post on its AdWords blog that it is rolling out new 360-degree video advertisements to help advertisers “engage their audience in an entirely new way.” The feature is currently supported in Chrome and on Android and iOS. Users can navigate through the 360-degree video by either dragging their mouse or tilting their phone up, down, left, and right. Google originally unveiled 360 video support earlier this year.

Expand
Expanding
Close

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt9zSfinwFA]

Update: Google has now officially announced the update, bringing three new tabs on top of vertical video support.

We all have friends who’ve done it: fail to recognize that shooting video is different from taking a photo, and end up shooting vertical video. YouTube has for some time tried to lessen their embarrassment with a pseudo horizontal view, but the latest update to the Android app takes things a stage further by acting like they didn’t do anything dumb in the first place … 
Expand
Expanding
Close

The Associated Press and British Movietone have both uploaded their entire historical news archives to YouTube, totalling more than a million minutes of footage, and covering events dating back to 1895. They join British Pathé, which uploaded its entire 100-year library last year.

The archival footage includes major world events such as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, exclusive footage of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 2001 terrorist attacks on the US.

AP says that it may later look to monetize the content with ads, but for now will rely on revenue from licensing deals with documentary makers and others to fund the work … 
Expand
Expanding
Close

Google is pushing ahead with its plans to launch a paid YouTube service by the end of this year. So far, it’s signed up YouTube partners accounting for more than 90% of it views, but major TV networks are still holding out. Fox, NBC and CBS (among others) are still holding back according to Bloomberg’s sources.

Without support from TV networks, YouTube will have to attract paying subscribers with its own original content, or try and attract payers with nothing more than its home-grown stars and music videos. But that doesn’t mean the company is down-beat. There are many more options on its plate.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Microsoft recently released its Cortana digital assistant as a beta app, and we’ve been able to get our hands on the preview. Apart from its Material-like design, the app looks, performs, and acts just like the Cortana on Windows Phone. You can ask it to set reminders, give you directions and weather information, or do simple arithmetic. It has its limitations and doesn’t feel quite as intuitive or in-depth as Google Now or Siri, but it has its uses.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Googlers use their 20% in many different ways, and usually that means building a product or service they hope will someday see some amount of wider adoption. Gmail and AdSense were both built in 20% time, and now they’re two of Google’s biggest services.

Nat & Lo are going to do something a bit different. Since most people don’t ever get a chance to really see how Google ticks behind the scenes, Nat & Lo thought they would use their 20% time to show us — and they’re doing so via a newly-launched YouTube channel.
Expand
Expanding
Close

YouTube Creator Studio is YouTube’s app through which creators can manage their accounts on the go. Now the company is creating a “Trusted Tester” program through which passionate Creator Studio users will be able to receive new updates to the app prior to their public release, and in return provide feedback and insights that will help YouTube improve the app.

Expand
Expanding
Close

In a recent video uploaded to the YouTube Creators channel, employees from the video platform outlined changes and new features coming soon across mobile and desktop including a new channel card. The purpose of the card is to add a heightened level of interactivity to videos by allowing creators to embed an inline link in the video player to another channel they may want to promote — maybe because they’re featured in the video, for example.

According to a tweet from YouTube, that card just went live for creators today.

Expand
Expanding
Close

The Internet has changed the way we access, view, ingest, and share knowledge, and Google has played a big part in that, with its mission from day one being to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. Now through a new project called Google Camp, the company will train kids to utilize their services as early as possible — starting from the ages of 7-10 years old, specifically. The program seems to focus on online project-based science lessons…

Expand
Expanding
Close

Update: The premium version is on sale today (July 2nd) for $1.49, or 50% off its regular price. Just press the Google Play icon from within the phone app to upgrade.

Have you ever found yourself standing in line at a coffee shop and thought to yourself, “Man, I really wish I could watch that video of the squirrel playing a tiny violin”? Me too! Fortunately for both of us, our prayers have been answered: Wear Video Tube will stream videos from your Android smartphone to your Wear watch.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Amongst those who regularly publish content to YouTube, the video site is known for picking favorites and being a black box in terms of the communication it holds with the community when it comes to anyone other than the site’s biggest stars. The company has as of late been trying to change that perception, though, by using the YouTube Creators channel as an outlet to recognize and acknowledge the feedback and concerns of its users. Today it published a new video outlining changes and new features coming soon to the video platform.

Expand
Expanding
Close