YouTube

According to industry sources who spoke to Re/code, YouTube is aiming to launch its long-awaited subscription service as soon as next month. What’s interesting in this report is that the sources in-the-know stated that the subscription will be sold as a 2-in-1 deal. One monthly fee will purportedly get you access to both music streaming and ad-free videos…

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The YouTube Gaming app launched on Android about a month ago, but now we’re already hearing about a significant update that’s on the way. As was first revealed in a teardown done by Android Police earlier this month, Google has now confirmed that it is preparing to introduce Android game broadcasting straight from the app itself…
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It’s no secret that Google makes the majority of its money from advertising revenue, and has done for a very long time. So, when a product comes along to threaten that major revenue stream, it has to find ways to combat it. That’s seemingly what it’s done with AdBlock Plus, a relatively well-known Chrome extension used to block out ads across the internet. This includes the ads shown before and during video playback on YouTube…

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Good news, fans of live-streamed gaming: YouTube Gaming is now available for Android from Google Play. YouTube announced that it would be releasing a dedicated app for watching gaming-related live streams and videos hosted on the platform several months back, shortly after Amazon acquired competitor Twitch for nearly $1 billion. Downloading the app from the Play Store is limited to US and UK residents initially.

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One of the latest and greatest features with Samsung’s Galaxy Note 5 and S6 Edge+ is the ability to instantly live stream from the Camera app via YouTube. It’s pretty neat, but unfortunately I ran into an issue when attempting this for the first time. I’d get the “error message” shown in the above image after the quick sign-in process and nothing else would happen.

I’ve been poking around within the Google Plus and YouTube settings and I’ve come across a working solution for this problem. For those who are new to this thread in the future, here’s a rundown of the issue…

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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.

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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.

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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 … 
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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 … 
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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:
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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[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 … 
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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 … 
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