Official Blog
Innovation in accessibility
Thursday, 19 November 2009
Creating captions for your videos on YouTube becomes much
easier
today, thanks to automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology.
Auto-Timing:
Upload a transcript (a simple file with the text of what's said in the video), and through speech recognition technology we'll turn it into synchronized captions. Timing is the toughest part of creating captions, but now this should be much easier. The technology works best for videos with good sound quality and clear spoken English.
Auto-Captions:
We use the same speech recognition technology to create machine-generated captions (which can then be
translated into 51 languages
). You can see auto-caps in action right now on a range of educational channels, such as
UC Berkeley
,
Stanford
,
MIT
,
Yale
,
UCLA
,
Duke
,
UCTV
,
Columbia
,
PBS
,
National Geographic
,
Demand Media
,
UNSW
and most
Google
channels, including
YouTube
's. Click on the menu button at the bottom right of the video player, then click CC and the arrow to its left, then click the new "Transcribe Audio" button. In time, we hope to expand this feature for many more YouTube videos.
Auto-caps is a continued step towards YouTube's goal of making video accessible everywhere (web, mobile, TV) and to everyone (other countries, languages, alternative access modes). It's also an example of using technology to enhance the video experience. For more details, please check
this post
on the Google Blog.
To learn more about how to use auto-caps and auto-timing, check out our
help center article
and this short video:
Hiroto Tokusei, Senior Product Manager, recently watched "
(HD) 夜のゆりかもめ（新橋→豊洲） 01
."
Update (11/29):
On November 24, we posted a full-length video of this feature's announcement event in Washington, D.C. We have included English captions using the new auto-timing capabilities:
Hub for parents launches
Wednesday, 18 November 2009
YouTube and Kodak have teamed up to launch
For Mom
, a robust resource for anyone raising children today. The videos housed on this channel cover everything from cooking and parenting tips, to the best toys and games for kids, to easy ways to maintain your own health and beauty routine. There are even responses to some of life’s most difficult questions, like how much to pay the tooth fairy:
Browse through
For Mom
(and come back often!) for more videos from YouTube partners who know a thing or two about parenting, including
Better
,
Parents TV
,
Lifetime
and
popular mommy bloggers
who expertly find humor in what's often called the hardest job on earth.
Sadia Harper, Howto & Style Manager, recently watched
"Things My Kids Will Never Know."
Curator of the Month: Michael Wesch
Wednesday, 18 November 2009
Anthropology professor Michael Wesch has the awesome job of studying YouTube and thinking about what it all means. We asked him to curate
a playlist
of his favorite videos, and he came back with an impressive list of clips that exemplify how the "wonderfully playful participatory culture" you've created manifests itself on YouTube. Four of those videos are on our
homepage
today, but he also wrote this thoughtful blog post to accompany his picks. Reading it, you'll get a sense of how a single video or person can create a ripple that swells into something so much bigger than ourselves.
What I love about online video is the way that it has allowed more people to join a global conversation. Television was a medium whose content was controlled by the few and made for the masses. It created a one-way conversation, and you had to be on TV to get your turn. We have all been excluded from that conversation for so long, it is no wonder that so many people are now jumping in (over 1 million videos uploaded online every day by my count).
One of my first favorites was Gary Brolsma's "
Numa Numa dance,"
which he posted on Newgrounds.com in late 2004. When YouTube came along a few months later and made it so much easier for people to upload videos, thousands of people joined the dance. A search for "Numa Numa" now brings up over 125,000 videos, most of which are people doing their own rendition of the now-famous dance. And it is still going. [Recently],
Brolsma led the Michigan State Band
(and the whole stadium) doing the "Numa Numa."
There is a wonderfully playful participatory culture popping up all over the online video landscape.
A few days ago, I was having lunch with a guy who told me that he and his kids (ages 2 and 6) were working on their own rendition of
blinktwice4y's YouTube hit "Mario Kart Love Song"
. When they are done, they will join hundreds of others who have also created their own rendition. And if you love participatory culture as much as I do, you might just find the more obscure ones to be the most entertaining (like
matrock records jamming it out Brady Bunch style
) and sometimes heartwarming (don't you just love
these kids playing it live
? Or how 'bout these
young kids acting out the video
? You just know they will be watching this with the tears rolling and hearts warming in 30 years. Or even
this wedding serenade
).
And speaking of weddings, almost everybody saw the
JK Wedding Entrance Dance
, but the remixes and remakes are a real treat. There is of course the
"Divorce Dance,"
the live remakes at weddings everywhere (here's
one from Spain
) and even
babies are getting in on it
.
Or remember how OK Go made their career with that
amazing treadmill dance
? But what could be cooler than doing it
live at your high school
in front of all your friends? Of course, Granbury High was not the only remake. There are
hundreds
, yes, hundreds of groups of high school kids who somehow wrangled together several working treadmills, rolled them into high school auditoriums all over the world, and did their thing.
Undoubtedly, some people performing on YouTube are hoping to be the next Esmee Denters. It wasn't so long ago that Esmee was just a young girl singing (beautifully) in front of a
crappy webcam
-- until one day she was singing a Justin Timberlake song in front of a slightly better camera, which slowly panned right to reveal that none other than Justin Timberlake himself was in the room, and that
he had just signed her
to a record deal.
There's still a lot of unsigned talent out there, like
Megan Tonjes
or
mandyvbats
, who was brought to my attention by the absolutely amazing work of
Kutiman
, a musician who brought together snippets of YouTube artists from all over the world, working in so many genres, to create such beautiful music (which to me is the
real
YouTube orchestra).
But my favorite online video moments are those where the participatory culture spills out into the real world. There is probably no better example than the
Free Hugs movement
. Now three years old, it is still going, and it's global. But of course it wouldn't be participatory culture without the clever parody, which Greg Benson of mediocrefilms performed brilliantly by offering his
"Deluxe Hugs"
for $2.
The tools for such clever commentary and remixing are always growing, and several of my new favorites are coming from the creative uses of Auto-Tune. The Gregory Brothers have really mastered this with their
Autotune the News series
.
Melodysheep is now bringing his amazing talents to set the beautiful insights of the best scientists of recent years (like
Carl Sagan
) to some moving music.
So much of this creativity relies on the freedom to remix and build on the material created by others, a freedom that's constantly being challenged. Which brings me to one of my more serious recommendations:
Brett Gaylor's RIP: A Remix Manifesto
. Or for a wonderfully artistic statement within the same theme, one of the most amazing videos on all of YouTube is
Us by Blimvisible
.
My favorite video of all time still remains
MadV's "The Message."
It comes from the early days of YouTube, when so many of us were still just amazed that we could reach out to millions of people through our webcams. MadV invited us to write a message for the world on our hands. The resulting compilation may just become one of those iconic videos that our descendants hundreds of years might look back on and say, "So this is what they had to say when they first wired up all those computers and cameras throughout the world..." He's now doing an
HD version
if you want to join in.
If you are interested in how we try to make sense of all of this in anthropological terms, check out
"An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube
," where my students and I discuss many of these videos and a whole bunch more:
Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Kansas State University
Connecting citizens and journalists with YouTube Direct
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Every day, people with video cameras are changing the ways we get our news. We see it during
elections
. We see it during
earthquakes
,
fires
and other
natural disasters
. We see it on our
freeways
, in our
schools
and in our
public spaces
. Almost any event that takes place today has a chance of being captured on camera. As YouTube has become a global platform for sharing the news, media organizations have been looking for a good way to connect directly with citizen reporters on our site so they can broadcast this footage and bring it to a larger audience.
That's why we created
YouTube Direct
, a new tool that allows media organizations to request, review and rebroadcast YouTube clips directly from YouTube users. Built from our APIs, this open source application lets media organizations enable customized versions of YouTube's upload platform on their own websites. Users can upload videos directly into this application, which also enables the hosting organization to easily review video submissions and select the best ones to broadcast on-air and on their websites. As always, these videos also live on YouTube, so users can reach their own audience while also getting broader exposure and editorial validation for the videos they create.
Though we built YouTube Direct to help news organizations expand their coverage and connect directly with their audiences, the application is designed to meet any organization's goal of leveraging video content submitted by the community. Businesses can use YouTube Direct to solicit promotional videos, nonprofits can use the application to call-out for support videos around social campaigns and politicians can use the platform to ask for user-generated political commercials. The opportunities to use the tool are as broad as the media spectrum itself.
Already, we've seen
ABC News
, the
Huffington Post
,
NPR
,
Politico
, the
San Francisco Chronicle
, the
Washington Post
, and
WHDH-TV/WLVI-TV
in Boston using YouTube Direct. We look forward to seeing many more organizations to do the same.
To get started, visit
youtube.com/direct
.
Steve Grove, YouTube News and Politics, recently watched "
The WonderScope Challenge
"
"Holiday Solutions" channel debuts
Monday, 16 November 2009
It's getting to be that time of year again, when hosting dinners, attending parties, and finding the perfect gifts are top of mind. To help you navigate through it all, we're partnering with Target to bring you a channel full of videos from YouTube partners who know how to master every element of the holiday season. The channel is called
Holiday Solutions
and on it you'll find videos about seasonal cooking, party planning and creative gift ideas. For example, here are a few melt-in-your-mouth recipes:
In fact,
Food Network
chef Alton Brown is taking your questions now about Thanksgiving recipes and will answer a handful in a special video series next week.
Submit your query in the comments portion of the Holiday Solutions channel
and stay tuned for Brown's responses.
Sadia Harper, Howto & Style Manager, recently watched "
Cooking the Perfect Turkey
"
1080p HD Is Coming to YouTube
Thursday, 12 November 2009
We're excited to say that support for watching 1080p HD videos in full resolution is on its way. Starting next week, YouTube's HD mode will add support for viewing videos in 720p or 1080p, depending on the resolution of the original source, up from our maximum output of 720p today.
As resolution of consumer cameras increases, we want to make sure YouTube is the best home on the web to showcase your content. For viewers with big monitors and a fast computer, try switching to 1080p to get the most out of the fullscreen experience.
Just how much larger is 1080p? Take a look at the following screenshots from
this video
:
Standard - 360p
HQ - 480p
HD - 720p
HD - 1080p
Have an HD camera? We would love to see your awesome 1080p videos! Be creative and choose subjects that really show off the beauty of your camera. We will run the best examples on our homepage in a future spotlight.
And those of you who have already uploaded in 1080p, don't worry. We're in the process of re-encoding your videos so we can show them the way you intended.
Billy Biggs, Software Engineer, recently watched
"Toy Story 3 - Official Teaser Trailer [HD]."
How We Think About Social
Wednesday, 11 November 2009
Social features like commenting, rating, video responses and even just emailing or IMing a video's link have always been a part of the YouTube experience. So that's why we spend a lot of time here thinking about how to make the site an even more social place. We're especially focused on wanting to make it as easy as possible for you to find the people you know on YouTube and to follow their activity (what videos are they rating? favoriting? commenting on?) by subscribing to their channel; it's a great way to stay up on what they're into as well as discover new content yourself. As you consume these videos and start sharing your own
,
you in turn "feed"
your
friends a tasty helping of video goodness. It breaks into this virtuous distribution cycle:
As we've built these tools directly into YouTube itself, with things like
friend suggestions based on your Gmail address book
and
connecting your YouTube account to social networks
via our
AutoShare feature
, we've started to see people becoming even more social. Some of this activity is hard to quantify -- every day millions of YouTube links are sent via email, IM, Twitter and other communication methods --
but we can tell you that:
Over one million people are AutoSharing videos to Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader
Each AutoShared Tweet you send out from YouTube turns into an average of seven new sessions on YouTube.com
Over a million people have found and subscribed to at least one friend on YouTube based on our Friend Suggest feature
Most Tweeted video yesterday?
Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance"
More than one million new subscriptions are created every day
We hope these numbers will only rise as we focus on giving you the tools you need to connect with the people who matter most to you. In the process, expect to be entertained and informed by the videos circulating amongst your most trusted friends, subscribers and networks. You can get started today by ensuring that you're discoverable on YouTube (click
here
and check off "Let others find my channel on YouTube if they have my email address") and by connecting your account to your external networks via AutoShare (click
here
to set that up).
What do you think "social" on YouTube means, and where would you like to see it go? Leave a comment below.
Brian Glick, Product Manager, recently watched
"
Michael Jackson - Beat It,"
and James Phillips, Software Engineer, recently watched
"
New Wearable Feedbags Let Americans Eat More, Move Less."
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