We want YouTube to be the best place to upload video. Without question, the
number one requested feature by our creators is to upload videos longer than
10 minutes. We’ve heard you, and today we’re pleased to announce that we’ve
increased the upload limit to 15 minutes.
We encourage you to take full advantage of this new time limit by making a
video of your “
15
minutes of fame.” Imagine that this video is all the world will
ever know about you: what would you want to communicate? What will be the
enduring stamp you’ve left on us all? Tag your video with “yt15minutes,”
upload it by Wednesday, August 4, and we’ll select a handful of people to
truly gain their 15 minutes of fame by featuring them on the YouTube homepage
in a future spotlight.
In the meantime, you may wonder “why now?” -- the upload limit for
non-partners has been 10 minutes for years. Well, we’ve spent significant
resources on creating and improving our state-of-the-art
Content ID
system and many other powerful tools for copyright owners. Now, all of the
major U.S. movie studios, music labels and over 1,000 other global partners
use Content ID to manage their content on YouTube. Because of the success of
these ongoing technological efforts, we are able to increase the upload limit
today. We will continue our strong commitment to provide advanced technology
and tools to protect the rights of small and large copyright owners worldwide.
We’ll also do everything we can to release incremental improvements like this
one that benefit our video creators.
One final note: if you’re uploading a video that was previously rejected for
being too long, you’ll have to go into “My Videos” and delete it before
attempting to upload it again. Thanks and happy uploading!
You may have noticed we've been experimenting with a new YouTube homepage.
After countless user studies and community surveys, one thing came in loud and
clear: the homepage in its current form doesn’t mean much to most of you, and
could be more personally relevant. So the goal of this experiment was to put
more of an emphasis on "videos for you.”
To pave the way for this experiment, we removed some of the less-used modules
such as "Videos Being Watched Now.” Then we moved modules like "Spotlight" and
"Featured Videos" over to the right side. All of these changes were to make
room for a combined list of personally relevant videos made up of
recommendations for you, your subscriptions activity, and videos being shared
by your friends.
Recently we opened up the experimental homepage to anyone who wanted to try it
out. Millions of users opted in and now have this new version set as their
homepage. Many of the people who tried the experimental homepage filled out
our feedback form. While not everyone loved it, most people thought the new
homepage was better than the old homepage.
Here are some of the enhancements offered by the new homepage (logged in users
only):
- Increased focus on videos that matter to you (subscriptions, friend's
sharing, recommendations)
- You can easily filter your homepage to show only the latest uploads from
your subscriptions
- Don't miss anything; if a channel uploads four videos in a day, you’ll
see all four - instead of just the latest video
- Quick access to the inbox when you have new messages or comments
- Knows what you have seen (videos you've watched are grayed out)
- Remove any video (hover and click the "x" button)
Although some of you might miss some features, we think this latest version is
a step in the right direction. It’s simpler, more personal, and it makes it
easier to follow and watch the videos that are meaningful to you. So today
we're rolling out this new homepage for all logged in users worldwide.
We're dedicated to making YouTube the best place for you to discover and share
great videos. Please send us your feedback in a video, in the forums, on this
blog or on Twitter. As always, we’ll be listening and taking your feedback
very seriously.
Share and share alike: we’ve acquired Fflick
Many of the YouTube videos you watch and love are also shared on sites
beyond YouTube.com. Our site is built, in part, on social tools like
comments, video responses and ratings. In recent years we’ve worked to
integrate these social signals across other popular social platforms. For
example, we see more than 400 tweets per minute containing a YouTube link,
and over 150 years worth of YouTube video is watched on Facebook every day.
We've always believed that there are great conversations happening all the
time off of YouTube.com, and that commentary has the potential to enrich
your experience when watching and discovering video on YouTube itself. So
today we're excited to announce we’ve acquired Fflick, a talented team that
analyzes social media data to surface great content and the discussions
around it. We were impressed by the technical talent, design instincts and
entrepreneurial spirit of the Fflick team. As part of YouTube, the Fflick
team will help us build features to connect you with the great videos talked
about all over the web, and surface the best of those conversations for you
to participate in. We look forward to rolling out more features that help
you enjoy and discover new videos to watch, so stay tuned!
Shiva
Rajaraman, Group Product Manager, recently discovered “Stjepan
Hauser and Luka Sulic - Smooth Criminal” on Twitter.
Earlier this week,
Google unveiled the
Google Art Project—a new site that lets you explore hundreds of artworks
from 17 of the world’s most acclaimed art museums in extraordinary levels of
detail, as well as take 360 degree tours of the museums using Street View
technology.
With this project comes the launch of many of the museums’ very own YouTube
channels -- along with an array of new videos about the artworks featured in
the project. On the Google Art Project site you can explore 1000+ pieces of
artwork at an amazingly high resolution levels. While zooming into a work of
art you can also watch YouTube videos about it, as well as reading more
about a particular artwork and its artist. More than 170 works of art in the
project have accompanying videos; learn about
a professional snowboarder’s perspective on an alpine landscape, the
20+ locations of Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’ , the
preservation process for Van Gogh’s ‘The Bedroom’ or even the
live reaction of a pair of identical twins to a 17th century painting of
twins.
You can browse a selection of the featured artwork videos on the
Art Project’s YouTube channel, where you can also see
behind the scenes footage of the project.
This project began as a 20% project for a group of Googlers who are
passionate about making art more accessible online. We hope you enjoy
these videos and maybe deepen your understanding of some of the world’s
most famous works of art.
Anna de Paula Hanika, Project Manager,
Google Art Project, recently watched “Art
Project preview.”
It’s been hard to open a laptop or turn on the television over the last week
without hearing news of the unrest in Egypt. On YouTube, thousands of videos
of the protests have poured in, whether as unfiltered footage from the
demonstrations themselves, or as news reports from our media partners around
the globe.
We understand how closely the world is following these events, and want to
help people access and share this information quickly and easily on YouTube.
We’re helping people do this in three ways:
- Highlighting the latest footage on
CitizenTube, our news and politics channel, and inviting people to
submit video they’ve come across.
- Pointing our users directly to these videos through banners at the top
of YouTube pages, and through links alongside YouTube videos.
- Streaming live coverage of Al Jazeera’s broadcasts about the unfolding
events, on both their
Arabic and
English YouTube channels.
And our Google colleagues have also turned on a
speak-to-tweet service to help people in Egypt stay connected at this
difficult time.
Here’s a playlist of videos that have come in:
YouTube has used similar tools and live streaming technologies in the past
to give our users access to information on major world news events, such as
the
Haiti earthquake and the
protests in Iran. We hope this footage provides a unique window into the
events unfolding in the streets of Cairo, Alexandria and many other cities
across Egypt.
Olivia Ma, YouTube News and Politics,
recently watched “28th
Jan. 2011 - Storyful - Kasr Al Nile Bridge clashes.”
Earlier today, for the second year in a row, President Obama sat down with
YouTube for his first interview after the State of the Union speech. The
President took the opportunity to respond to the
protests in Egypt for the first time, to address your concerns on jobs,
the debt, and health care, and to answer a series of more personal questions
that
you submitted in video and text over the past few days on YouTube. The
interview took place in the Diplomatic Room in the West Wing, which is the
same room where FDR used to deliver his
fireside chats.
All told, you submitted almost 140,000 questions to our Google Moderator
platform over the past few days, and you cast more than 1.3 million votes on
which questions you wanted to have asked. With so many compelling questions,
it was a challenge to determine the final list to bring to the White House.
Our goal was to cover a wide range of issues that were relevant following
the State of the Union speech; to remove duplicate questions; and include
video questions wherever possible. With those criteria in mind, we looked at
the top 5% of the questions you voted to the top in order to determine which
questions to pose to the President. None of the questions were chosen by the
White House, or seen by the President before the interview. Here is a
playlist of all the video questions that were asked:
We’ll be conducting a similar interview with U.S. Speaker of the House John
Boehner in a few weeks - stay tuned for more details. And we’re also
expanding this YouTube Interview program globally as part of
YouTube World View, a series of interviews in 2011 that will give you
even more access and insight into leaders and elected officials from around
the world.
Steve Grove, Head of News & Politics,
recently watched
“Behind the scenes: Before and after the YouTube Interview with President
Obama.”
In around an hour’s time, U.S. President Barack Obama will sit down for his
first post-State of the Union interview – and you might be the interviewer.
Last week we announced that the President would address a selection of your
questions in a special YouTube interview. The deadline for question
submissions was midnight ET on Wednesday, January 26, and at that time more
than 190,000 people had cast more than 1.3 million votes on nearly 140,000
questions.
Tune in to
youtube.com/askobama at 2:30 p.m. ET to see and hear the President’s
responses to a selection of your top-voted questions, streamed live from the
White House.
Here’s a selection of just some of the thousand questions that were
submitted, on topics ranging from health care, to university education, to
jobs, to sports.
Olivia Ma, News and Politics Manager,
recently watched "Ask
President Obama."
Many of the YouTube videos you watch and love are also shared on sites
beyond YouTube.com. Our site is built, in part, on social tools like
comments, video responses and ratings. In recent years we’ve worked to
integrate these social signals across other popular social platforms. For
example, we see more than 400 tweets per minute containing a YouTube link,
and over 150 years worth of YouTube video is watched on Facebook every day.
We've always believed that there are great conversations happening all the
time off of YouTube.com, and that commentary has the potential to enrich
your experience when watching and discovering video on YouTube itself. So
today we're excited to announce we’ve acquired Fflick, a talented team that
analyzes social media data to surface great content and the discussions
around it.
We were impressed by the technical talent, design instincts and
entrepreneurial spirit of the Fflick team. As part of YouTube, the Fflick
team will help us build features to connect you with the great videos talked
about all over the web, and surface the best of those conversations for you
to participate in.
We look forward to rolling out more features that help you enjoy and
discover new videos to watch, so stay tuned!
Shiva Rajaraman, Group Product Manager, recently discovered “Stjepan
Hauser and Luka Sulic - Smooth Criminal” on Twitter.