Official Blog
TEXTp saves YouTube bandwidth, money
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
It’s great news that there are
24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute
, we
support 1080p
and
HD uploads are rising quickly
, but that’s also meant increasing bandwidth costs cutting into our bottom line. And so, in our drive to keep expenses under control, we’ve decided that April 1 is the perfect day to take the important step of offering a new way to experience YouTube: text-only mode, or TEXTp.
TEXTp is the result of months of intense transcoding efforts by our engineers, who toiled for weeks to ensure that a large chunk of videos on the platform could be reduced to their most basic elements. By replacing the images in the video with a series of letters and numbers, the videos are far less taxing on our system -- and have the added benefit of promoting literacy!
To give it a whirl, make sure you have the latest Flash player (10.0) and click
here
. Or you can select “TEXTp” from the pulldown menu on most videos, as so:
You can also append &textp=fool to most video URLs to test it out.
For every person who selects TEXTp and keeps it on while you watch a video, you save YouTube $1 a second, resulting in potentially billions of dollars of savings for us. So if you care about YouTube, you’ll use TEXTp today.
Patrick Pichette, SVP and Chief Financial Officer, Google
New video page launches for all users
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
As you may know, we're in the midst of one of the largest redesigns in YouTube's history: we're simplifying the look and functionality of the video page. That's the page you see whenever a video plays, and this redesign is about going "back to basics," focusing attention on the reason why you came to YouTube in the first place -- the video -- and all the ways you engage with content and creators.
We
first unveiled
the new video page two months ago and checked in four weeks later to tell you about the
latest set of changes
. Truth is, we've been thinking about this for a long time: what you see is the result of eight months' worth of user research, feedback and data analysis. Now, after a few more
additions
based on your latest feedback, we are rolling it out to 100% of YouTube users.
Here's what's new about the page:
Overall look and functionality
- It's cleaner, simpler and easier to use.
- Information about a video is now grouped together in one place and there's a consistent way to get more detail when you need it. This way, unless something's truly useful to you, it doesn't clutter up your page.
- We've cleaned up the actions bar; you'll see a streamlined presentation for sharing, flagging, and embedding controls.
Discovery
- The right-hand side of the page is devoted to the next video to watch. We're smarter about suggesting the next videos to watch based on how you found the video you're watching in the first place.
- The channel name and subscribe button are now both on top of the video. We found that you prefer having a quick peek at more videos uploaders have created before deciding whether to subscribe to their channels.
Playlists
- There's a new playlist interface, with the next video in the list appearing consistently in the top right. You can easily expand that list or skip ahead using a new next button in the player controls.
- Saving to playlists is easier, and we've made Favorites the default option.
Ratings
- We've replaced the
five-star ratings system
with a simpler "likes / dislikes" model and introduced a new "Videos I Liked" list.
Comments
- Comments have a new highlights view which summarizes the best discussions and celebrates when creators communicate with their audiences.
We know this is a big change, but we hope you'll find the new page to be an improvement to your YouTube experience and to be a reflection of what you've told us thus far through your usage of the site and your comments to us. We'll be gathering in a conference room at our San Bruno, CA, headquarters at 6 p.m. PT today and tomorrow, and in London at 9 a.m. GMT tomorrow, to respond in near-real-time to your comments in the
forums
, on this blog and on
Twitter
. Of course, we'll be listening at other times, too, but we wanted to make sure we were available when you might have the most questions about these changes.
Igor Kofman, Software Engineer, recently watched "
Pantyraid - Beba
," and Shiva Rajaraman, Product Manager, recently watched "
Chat Roulette Funny Piano Improv #2
."
YouTube community and Hollywood team up to address global development
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
The facts about the developing world are pretty staggering. Approximately 1.1 billion people in developing countries have inadequate access to water, and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation. For every $1 in aid a developing country receives, over $25 is spent on debt repayment. Almost half the world – 3 billion people – live on less than $2.50 a day.
Earlier this month,
Jeremy Piven challenged you
to educate others about the issues facing the developing world and the organizations working hard to address these problems, by making a video and submitting it to
YouTube's Video Volunteers program
.
You responded with fervor. This round of Video Volunteers had one of the highest participation rates so far, and the videos submitted ranged from creative and quirky...
...to beautiful and solemn...
Today, you'll find the top three submissions on the YouTube homepage, alongside a video from Jeremy Piven and members of young Hollywood on behalf of the
ONE Campaign
.
Later this week, we'll kick off a new climate-change focused round of Video Volunteers with former Vice President and environmental leader Al Gore, so stay tuned for news about that and our special Earth Day homepage spotlight.
Ramya Raghavan, Nonprofits & Activism Manager, recently watched "
Padma Lakshmi Discusses Endometriosis Awareness Month
.
"
Release notes: Facebook Connect, real-time sharing, subscriber stats
Saturday, March 27, 2010
In addition to some changes to our new video
page
, which we reported in a separate post, here are some things that have launched recently:
Invitation to Facebook Connect:
You've been able to
connect
your YouTube account to your Facebook account for a while now in order to
AutoShare
or to find friends to subscribe to. Less known is that the YouTube homepage can show you the YouTube videos your friends are sharing on Facebook; we've kept this under the radar while we've ramped up support. But now, when you log in to your YouTube account, you'll get a prominent invitation in the Recent Activity module (see below) to connect to Facebook, which we highly recommend that you do. In fact, we hope to integrate more social networks with YouTube going forward: knowing which videos your friends are sharing on social platforms is one of the best ways to discover those clips that you, in turn, just might feel compelled to pass along. That's how we found this
gem
, a lovely virtual choir.
Real-time sharing:
AutoShare lets you effortlessly share videos from YouTube to Twitter, Facebook or Google Reader. What you might not have known is that until recently, it took about 10 minutes for those items to get pushed out from YouTube to these platforms. Now these actions happen instantly, in real time.
Partner Program expands again:
Exciting! Users in Israel and
Mexico
can now become members of the YouTube Partner Program (YPP). To sign up, click
here
.
Subscribers tab in Insight:
The number of subscribers you have is an important metric for many YouTube users, as it indicates how many people love your videos
so much
that they want to be sure never to miss one. (Speaking of which, we commend
Nigahiga
, who recently hit
2 million subscribers
to become YouTube's No. 1 most subscribed channel of all time. But, we digress.) Insight, YouTube's analytics tool, recently added data about the evolution of your subscriber numbers over time, broken down into new subscriptions and unsubscriptions per day. Head over to your account's
Insight area
to check it out.
Planning our April Fool's Day joke:
What joke? :) We just wanted to see if you were reading this far.
The YouTube Team
New video page adds comments highlight view and ratings improvements
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Over the past couple of weeks, we've been busy iterating on the new video page design based on your feedback, and we're excited to share some new developments before the page is rolled out to everyone soon. Remember to
opt-in here
to get a preview of these new features:
Highlights view on comments
Many of you indicated that comments could use an overhaul and hoped that was a part of the redesign. We're happy to say that it is. Today, we're introducing a "highlights view" of comments which summarizes top rated comments, uploader comments, video responses and recent comments in a single "front-page story" that you can drill into for more detail. You can see an example on
this video
and
this one
. We're continuing to make the highlights better as we learn how people interact with it, so please let us know what you think in the comments below.
Ratings
We've also made some improvements to the new like/dislike ratings system. When you like a video, we let you know how many people liked it and disliked it. To help you remember the best videos you've encountered, there's a new area housing all the videos that you liked, called (surprise, surprise) "Videos I Liked." In addition, we listened to your feedback and no longer tie 'Liking' something to your Favorites, which you use more for personal saving. Favoriting a video is now the first option when you click "save"; you can continue to save videos to your Favorites in this manner or create another playlist just by typing in the name. Finally, throughout the site, you'll occasionally see a video marked 'Most Liked' to give you an indication that this is a video other people loved, that you may want to check out. We surface popular videos in many ways, and we hope Most Liked becomes a reliable signal that helps you find quality videos to watch.
For quick refresher on the overall video page design, check out this video produced by
TheWillofDC
:
And if you've opted in but want to go back to the old page, you can
opt out here
.
UPDATE:
After reading your comments, we'd like to note that some of you are opted in permanently to the new page, which means you are part of our current experiment and are unable to opt out. These kinds of experiments help us learn what works on the page and what doesn't, so that we can build the best possible site for you. We've also heard your feedback on Auto-play interrupting your experience and are working on some improvements.
Peter Bradshaw, Software Engineer, recently liked "
SOIL & "PIMP" SESSIONS 'Summer Goddess'
," and Tyler Morse, Software Engineer, recently liked "
Bottle Bank Arcade - TheFunTheory.com - Rolighetsteorin.se
."
More courses, more colleges: YouTube EDU turns one
Thursday, March 25, 2010
A college education is something many people take for granted, but only about 1% of the world actually gets one. A year ago today,
YouTube EDU
(
youtube.com/edu
) launched with a very simple mission: deliver some of the world’s greatest university courses to anyone with an Internet connection and a screen.
Whether it’s Salman Rushdie
reading poetry
by the last mughal king to Emory University students, or a
lecture in electrical engineering
at UC Berkeley, YouTube EDU has helped some of the oldest institutions on the planet blaze a trail into the 21st century by opening up a rich and empowering corpus of video content to aspiring students everywhere.
YouTube EDU is now one of the largest online video repositories of higher education content in the world. We have tripled our partner base to over 300 universities and colleges, including University of Cambridge, Yale, Stanford, MIT, University of Chicago and The Indian Institutes of Technology. We have grown to include university courses in seven languages across 10 countries. We now have over 350 full courses, a 75% increase from a year ago and thousands of aspiring students have viewed EDU videos tens of millions of times. And today, the EDU video library stands at over 65,000 videos.
We have also rolled out new products to make this coursework more accessible, including adding automated captions and auto-translation to videos spoken in English. In just a few clicks, you can generate captions and translate courses into one of 50 different languages.
At the end of the day, YouTube EDU is about using the democratic nature of the Internet and the power of video to make higher learning accessible to all. We’ve heard from thousands of users like trainerstone, who writes: “Thank you so much for your videos. I live in provincial Philippines and have very little access to the arts and academic stimulus.” But perhaps one user put it best: “This is what the Internet was created for.”
Here’s to another great year of great educational content on YouTube. Until then, keep watching and keep learning.
Obadiah Greenberg, Strategic Partner Manager, recently watched “
Khan Academy on PBS NewsHour
.”
Broadcast Yourself
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Around the globe, YouTube has become a metaphor for the democratizing power of the Internet and information. YouTube gives unknown performers, filmmakers, and artists new ways to promote their work to a global audience and rise to worldwide fame; makes it possible for political candidates and elected officials to interact with the public in new ways; enables first-hand reporting from war zones and from inside repressive regimes; and lets students of all ages and backgrounds audit classes at leading universities.
Yet YouTube and sites like it will cease to exist in their current form if Viacom and others have their way in their lawsuits against YouTube.
In their opening briefs in the Viacom vs. YouTube lawsuit (which have been
made public today
), Viacom and plaintiffs claim that YouTube doesn't do enough to keep their copyrighted material off the site. We ask the judge to rule that the safe harbors in the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act
(the "DMCA") protect YouTube from the plaintiffs' claims. Congress enacted the DMCA to benefit the public by permitting open platforms like YouTube to flourish on the Web. It gives online services protection from copyright liability if they remove unauthorized content once they’re on notice of its existence on the site.
With some minor exceptions, all videos are automatically copyrighted from the moment they are created, regardless of who creates them. This means all videos on YouTube are copyrighted -- from "
Charlie Bit My Finger
" to the video of your cat playing the piano and the video you took at your cousin’s wedding. The issue in this lawsuit is not whether a video is copyrighted, but whether it's authorized to be on the site. The DMCA (and common sense) recognizes that content owners, not service providers like YouTube, are in the best position to know whether a specific video is authorized to be on an Internet hosting service.
Because content owners large and small use YouTube in so many different ways, determining a particular copyright holder’s preference or a particular uploader’s authority over a given video on YouTube is difficult at best. And in this case, it was made even harder by Viacom’s own practices.
For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.
Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.
Given Viacom’s own actions, there is no way YouTube could ever have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the site. But Viacom thinks YouTube should somehow have figured it out. The legal rule that Viacom seeks would require YouTube -- and every Web platform -- to investigate and police all content users upload, and would subject those web sites to crushing liability if they get it wrong.
Viacom’s brief misconstrues isolated lines from a handful of emails produced in this case to try to show that YouTube was founded with bad intentions, and asks the judge to believe that, even though Viacom tried repeatedly to buy YouTube, YouTube is like Napster or Grokster.
Nothing could be further from the truth. YouTube has long been a leader in providing media companies with 21st century tools to control, distribute, and make money from their content online. Working in cooperation with rights holders, our Content ID system scans over 100 years worth of video every day and lets rights holders choose whether to block, leave up, or monetize those videos. Over 1,000 media companies are now using Content ID -- including every major U.S. network broadcaster, movie studio, and record label -- and the majority of those companies choose to make money from user uploaded clips rather than block them. This is a true win-win that reflects our long-standing commitment to working with rights holders to give them the choices they want, while advancing YouTube as a platform for creativity.
We look forward to defending YouTube, and upholding the balance that Congress struck in the DMCA to protect the rights of copyright holders, the progress of technological innovation, and the public interest in free expression.
Update: The site containing the declarations and supporting exhibits filed by YouTube in support of its motion for summary judgment is
here
.
Zahavah Levine, Chief Counsel, YouTube
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