Official YouTube Blog

Northern hemisphere spring brings the return of Live Green

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Live Greenwww.youtube.com/ytlivegreenLilian Leitersdorf, Marketing Programs, recently watched “World’s Greenest Homes: Grass Roof Bungalow”.

Music Tuesday: Record store clerks cut loose in YouTube and Coachella highlights

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

It’s Music Tuesday, and new albums are hitting the shelves from Gorillaz, Eliza Doolittle, Lenka, I’m From Barcelona and many more artists this week. Over here, we’re still recovering from the epic cascade of music that was Coachella. Relive the festival -- and check out this week’s offerings on youtube.com/music.

Record store clerks cut loose in YouTube
Before there was YouTube, people went to record stores to discover new music. The good news is, they still do -- and record store clerks remain some of the best tastemakers out there. So we’re starting a new, occasional series in which we invite influential independent music sellers to share their favorite videos with us. We kick off the series just days after Record Store Day with Amoeba Music, California’s premier tune-peddlers. They share their own original content -- who doesn’t want to find out what’s in ?uestlove’s shopping bag? -- as well as other awesome video finds: salsa great Celia Cruz in Africa, Miles Davis in action, and an excellent, weird video from psych pop outfit the Fresh & Onlys.

Coachella Highlights
You’re back at work, you’re rehydrating, you’re massaging your neck after craning to see Kanye float above the crowd...or chances are, if you weren’t in the desert in Indio, California this weekend, you might have been checking out the music festival live on youtube.com/coachella. It was an epic event, and with cameras on three stages, there was so much to see it was almost befuddling. But in case you missed it, guess what? We’ve got highlights.

Vacationer “Trip”
And now, notes from the underground. This video showed up in our inbox last week -- we’ve got very little information on the band, Vacationer (except that they’re from Brooklyn, natch), but when we heard the glitchy-but-catchy, flat-shoed sound of “Trip,” we started to get hooked. Then there’s the guy moon-walking next a waterfall in the video, plus exotic birds showing off their plumage in slow motion. Trust us; this is entrancing.

Sarah Bardeen, Music Community Manager, recently watched “DaVinci - Blame Game.”

Mmm mmm good - YouTube videos now served in WebM

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

If you travel abroad frequently, you know that charging your electronic devices is not always an easy task. Power adapters for cellphones and computers don’t always fit into local power outlets, meaning you have to pack converters. Think of video on the web in a similar way. Currently, there are countless devices used to record videos and hundreds of different video file formats. Even more, certain web browsers that you use to view video online only accept certain ‘codecs’ - or programs used to encode, transmit and playback video files - and others require plug-ins (converters) to integrate the video file with the browser.

Despite these complexities, one of our key aims is to deliver great content to you wherever you are - regardless of device, browser or other technical specification, so you never have to remember that complicated “power adapter converter” to watch a video.

To that end, all new videos uploaded to YouTube are now transcoded into WebM. WebM is an open media file format for video and audio on the web. Its openness allows anyone to improve the format and its integrations, resulting in a better experience for you in the long-term. As we work to transcode more videos into WebM, we hope to reduce the technical incompatibilities that prevent you from accessing video while improving the overall online video landscape.

Transcoding all new video uploads into WebM is an important first step, and we’re also working to transcode our entire video catalog to WebM. Given the massive size of our catalog - nearly 6 years of video is uploaded to YouTube every day - this is quite the undertaking. So far we’ve already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on the site or nearly 30% of all videos into WebM. We’re focusing first on the most viewed videos on the site, and we’ve made great progress here through our cloud-based video processing infrastructure that maximizes the efficiency of processing and transcoding without stopping. It works like this: at busy upload times, our processing power is dedicated to new uploads, and at less busy times, our cloud will automatically switch some of our processing to encode older videos into WebM. As we continue to transcode the remaining inventory, we’ll keep you posted on our progress.

In keeping with our goal of making videos universally accessible, we will continue to support H.264 as an important codec for video on YouTube. We are also committed to continuing to develop our HTML5 video player that we announced last year, and if you’d like to join the opt-in trial, you can do so here.

The world of online video is incredibly complex and dynamic. Yet, our goal is to ensure that nothing stands between you and the great content you’ve always enjoyed. We’ll continue to invest in new video technology that improves the experiences for all users, builds a better infrastructure for online video, leads to greater access of information and spurs continued innovation.

James Zern, Software Engineer, recently watched "HTML5 Video Accessiblity and the WebVTT File Format".

The Royal Wedding live on YouTube

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Google search trendspreviouslywww.youtube.com/theroyalchannel10:00am BST (9:00am GMT, 2:00am PT, 5:00am ET) on Friday, April 29The Royal ChannelRachel Ball, Partner Development Associate, recently watched "The Chapel Royal Choir prepares for the Royal Wedding."

Advertising Age Viral Video Awards

Monday, April 18, 2011

Of the most watched YouTube videos in 2010, two of the top 10 were advertisements, showing that more and more advertisers are creating video campaigns that strike a chord with viewers, sending them viral. Advertising Age and Visible Measures take a look at what campaigns are going viral every week as part of their Top 10 Viral Video Ads Charts, but when you look back on 2010, who comes out on top?

Last week, the Ad Age Viral Video Awards selected 10 video ads from across a variety of verticals to receive awards such as the, "Make a Dull Industry Fun" campaign and "Best Brand Jacking of a Global Sporting Event". All of them put theYouTube platform to work in innovative ways and are fantastic examples of how brands can engage viewers. Check out a sampling below, and for the full list of awards, go here.

Best Video-Only Campaign - BlendTec: "Will It Blend?"

Best Viral Mockumentary - Hi-Tec: "Liquid Mountaineering"

Best Video Advertainment - Red Bull: "Way Back Home"

Kate Rose, YouTube Communications, recently watched, "Opening Ceremony Blog - Spike Jonze Presents: Lil Buck and Yo-Yo Ma."

Mashups, parodies and lip dubs: Ask a legal expert about Fair use

Friday, April 15, 2011

The strength of the YouTube community lies in its creativity. Often this takes the form of memorable original content, such as Rebecca Black’s recent hit song / music video, Friday.

However, as the Rebecca Black phenomenon demonstrated yet again, this creativity also lies in the community’s ability to produce parodies, mashups, and remixes of well-known original content. In fact, if you love Rebecca Black, thanks to the YouTube community’s endless ability to riff on popular memes, there are a number of examples of Friday-inspired parodies. Here’s one from funnyman Conan O’Brien, which has close to half a million views:

Why are YouTube users like Conan allowed to produce parodies of Rebecca Black’s original song?
Fair use.

Fair use is a legal term that grants creators an exception to the strict copyright that the original content owner controls -- in layman’s terms, it’s the idea that as long as the use is “fair,” someone can reference part of someone else’s work for parody, scholarly reasons, or more.

What constitutes “fair use” is a complicated issue and one that we get asked about quite often. So we’ve asked two leading experts from the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, Anthony Falzone and Julie Ahrens, to help answer your questions.

Falzone is the Executive Director of the Fair Use Project and a lecturer in law at Stanford Law School. Ahrens is the Associate Director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford Law School. As litigators they have defended everyone from video game makers, to writers, to artists (including Shepard Fairey) against copyright claims.

Using Google Moderator you can ask Falzone your questions about fair use and vote on other questions. They will answer a selection of the top-voted questions via video and we’ll post it on this blog on Monday, May 2. Question submission closes April 21. Ask your questions here!

Will Houghteling, YouTube News and Politics, recently watched “The Path to Prosperity”

Coachella broadcasts live on YouTube all weekend

Friday, April 15, 2011

One of the biggest music festivals of the year kicks off today, and you don’t have to be camping in the desert to catch it.

Starting today at 4 p.m. PT / 7 p.m. ET, YouTube will webcast the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival directly from Indio, California to your computer -- without the 98 degree heat! Thanks to 5GUM, Coachella and YouTube, the world will have a front row seat to over 60 acts being live-streamed all weekend long at youtube.com/Coachella.

Tune in to watch sets by some of the biggest names in music, as well as the bands that have critics buzzing. The lineup is nothing short of astonishing: Kings of Leon. Cee Lo Green. Mumford and Sons. The Strokes. Duran Duran. The National. Nas + Damian Marley. The Black Keys. Ms. Lauryn Hill. The list goes on.

But don’t just take our word for it: check out what the bands themselves have to say about why they’re psyched to play Coachella, and what acts they’re dying to see.

If you miss the live stream, be sure to check out highlights on Coachella’s channel next week. And get ready to rock!

Sarah Bardeen, Music Community Manager, recently watched “Coachella 2010.”

Official Blog

Northern hemisphere spring brings the return of Live Green

Music Tuesday: Record store clerks cut loose in YouTube and Coachella highlights

Mmm mmm good - YouTube videos now served in WebM

The Royal Wedding live on YouTube

Advertising Age Viral Video Awards

Mashups, parodies and lip dubs: Ask a legal expert about Fair use

Coachella broadcasts live on YouTube all weekend

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