News from the YouTube universe... Nonprofit programme launches in Australia and Canada: Like their American and British peers, nonprofits in Australia and Canada can now apply to become part of the YouTube Nonprofit Program. Members receive free branded channels, custom thumbnails, longer video uploads, and call-to-action overlays. For more information, and to apply, please go to www.youtube.com/nonprofits.Easier private video sharing: You no longer need to be friends with someone in order to share a private video with them. You can either generate a special URL that up to 25 people can click on, or select the "Private share with YouTube users" option on the video's details page and write in the username(s), separated by a comma, with whom you'd like to share (see screenshot below). After you click "send," the recipient will see the video in his or her inbox.
When we registered the YouTube domain on February 14, 2005, we set out to create a place where anyone with a video camera and an Internet connection could share a story with the world. Five years into it, we're as committed as ever to the core beliefs and principles that guided YouTube's creation:Video gives people a voice – From classrooms to war-torn countries, the Queen of England to the King of Pop, the Pope to the President of the United States, and the hillsides of Port au Prince to the streets of Tehran, video has the power to give rise to the most diverse set of faces and voices ever seen or heard in human history.We succeed when our partners succeed – Our content partners run the gamut, from major Hollywood studios to aspiring filmmakers and vloggers who can turn the ordinary into something extraordinary on the turn of a dime. Content creation isn't our business; it's theirs. But breaking open access to media and distribution means delivering the world's largest global audience and the revenue models they need to succeed, as well as the tools they need to control their content.Video evolves fast, YouTube must evolve faster – The Internet evolves at break-neck speed. We launch products quickly and constantly iterate to stay one step ahead of it. Our goal? To set the standard in online video delivery. Fast loading, high quality videos need to be able to play on any device, anywhere, anytime. And whether we're supporting 1080p, 3D, or deploying auto-speech recognition technology, we innovate with an eye toward providing the best possible experience for all of you.
Today we are happy to welcome Opera tenor Rolando Villazon as Guest Editor of the YouTube UK homepage. Currently part of the judging panel on ITV show “Popstar To Operastar”, the singer has seized the opportunity to share some of his favourite music with the YouTube audience – and, frankly, even if you aren’t a huge fan of his selections (shame on you!), you can’t deny the man’s passion, conviction or enthusiasm.
“I think that Classical Music, Opera, is something that can really shake everybody’s life,” he explains. “Imagine we are bottles full of water. Inside this water there are particles dancing around. Our everyday life makes those particles… settle in the bottom. A great performance – Great Art – will shake the bottles and make all those particles come alive.”
That’s the kind of talk we warm to here at YouTube UK, and to hear more click on the playlist below, which features Rolando talking through his three homepage picks and features more of the videos that caught his eye on the service.
To see more from Rolando Villazon, head to his YouTube channel, VillazonMusic. Hopefully you have enjoyed his day at the controls – some great music, a sprinkling of philosophy and the distinct impression of having encountered someone who is truly in their element. Long may he remain so.
Have fun,
Jamie Dolling, Community Editor, YouTube UK, recently watched “Lemur Tickles”.
Today the 33rd staging of the America’s Cup Regatta – the oldest active trophy in international sport – gets underway in waters off Valencia, with the holders, the Société Nautique de Genève, taking on the Golden Gate Yacht Club. For the first time ever the entire event will be shown live online and you can access the stream via the America’s Cup channel here on YouTube.
Both 90-foot boats are something to behold: the Alinghi 5 catamaran boasting a mast as tall as a 17-storey building; the trimaran BMW Oracle USA 17 sporting a rigid wing sail based on aerospace technology. To date the competition has been overwhelmed by legal issues, the teams apparently having spent more time in closed courtrooms than on the open water, but now the talking is over and the racing can commence.
The America’s Cup is decided over three races, the first and third being 40 nautical miles and the second 39. Once the wind starts to blow, the sight of both contenders under full sail should be stunning, so stay tuned YouTube to catch the action in real time.
Jamie Dolling, Community Editor, YouTube UK, recently watched “Inside The Wing”.
From the Queen of England to the queen of your 'hood, from aspiring filmmakers to Hollywood studios, from high school graduation videos to citizen reports of revolutionary moments in Iran, everything has a home on YouTube. This creates a really big challenge: how do we design a site that reflects so many different users, experiences and videos? This is a question we've thought about a lot since we launched in 2005. The result of some of this thinking (some might say over-thinking) is a video page packed with features that reflect a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but can feel cluttered and a little overwhelming. We've spent a lot of time over the last 10 months asking ourselves some tough questions about this page and posing some of those questions to you in blog posts, roundtable discussions, one-on-one conversations with the community and even on forums like our Product Ideas for YouTube page. Today, we're excited to unveil the first major example of our efforts to simplify and streamline the video page to offer the best possible watching experience. To check out this new look all you have to do is opt-in. Click on this link to try it out (anyone can opt-in, but for now page elements are only in English). To revert back to the old video page, use the opt-out link at the top of the new video page or opt out here. We'll be making the opt-in more easily accessible soon, but we wanted to give our most passionate users a chance to experiment with it early. Below are some highlights of some of the things that have changed and why. You can also check out our "Getting Started Guide" in the Help Centre. Streamlined look and functionality -- the video is the star: This concept is at the heart of the redesign. YouTube is about creating and watching the world's biggest video collection; therefore, the design should make the video the star. To that end, the new look is more subdued, stripped down and simple than before. The design should help ease users into advanced features, while providing power users with all the functionality they want. New "next up" video list: We'll be smarter about queuing up other videos for you to watch on the right side of the page that will take into consideration how you found a video. For example, if you arrived at a video through Search, the rest of the search results will follow you to the playback page so your can continue to browse search results on the video page. The same goes for playlists and recommendations; if that's how you found a video, then that's what will show up on the right side of the page. Again, this is about creating a consistent viewing experience -- and a relevant one when we include context about your viewing intentions. Description and stats areas united: More specific information about the video you're watching is now in one place on the page: underneath the video. Click on the "Description" snippet or the Views to see more. This new expand capability works on multiple elements of the page so you won't have to learn a new trick to view each piece of data. The result: less clutter, especially on the right side where you look for the next video to watch. Cleaned up actions bar: Actions like sharing, rating, saving or flagging a video are now all grouped in one place, with a cleaner, simpler "button bar." We thought a lot about practicality here, choosing to expose only the most commonly used actions and language for you. And, "Playlists" can now be built via the "Save to" pulldown menu. Simplified binary ratings: As we noted in an earlier blog post, the rating system on YouTube doesn't really work that well (e.g. only the 1 and 5 star ratings were ever really used). So we moved towards a simpler "Like / Don't Like" model. Liking a video will also save it to your Favorites to make it easy to find those videos again. New player sizing and video quality controls: We're adding a new size control into the player that allows you to pick a larger size to watch your video (formally above the player). When you pick the size, we'll serve you the ideal quality. For those of you hungry for more control, you can pick the specific video quality (for example, SD, HD or 1080p) in an associated drop-down menu. We'll warn you when we think there may be a better quality choice, but the control is in your hands. Search results within the page: Now you can now search while you're watching a video and results will appear on the right side of the video page, without interrupting the viewing experience. More prominent channel/subscriber placement and a new "see more videos" feature: Subscriptions are important to many of you, so we've made it more noticeable by moving the "Subscribe" button to the top of the video right near the title. This also gives anyone the ability to quickly peek at more videos from the creator's channel. (Just click on the arrow next to the number of uploads on the person's channel to see more videos from that user.) You've told us that making you hunt for this information on the page is confusing and many of you wanted this data in one place. This should make it easier to discover more content from videographers you like. So those are just a few things you'll find in this new video page experience. As with all things on the Web (and in life?), change is hard and can take some time to get used to. That's why we did a lot of research, talked with so many of you and incorporated your thoughts into this latest back-to-basics playback page. So go on and "opt-in" to give it a whirl, and let us know what you think either in comments down below or enter feedback via this survey. Who knows -- you might see some of your own suggestions in future iterations of the page down the road. Julian Frumar, User Experience Designer, recently watched "WTF Collective," and Igor Kofman, Software Engineer, recently watched "Zion-I featuring K. Flay - "Coastin'" [The Takeover]."
Update: Reminder: Please enter feedback here, in our new Product Ideas page.+++The excitement of the new decade and our upcoming fifth anniversary has the YouTube team itching to make the site experience better than ever before. We have all kinds of ideas about new things we could build and launch, but we are also taking some significant time in the coming months to do some early "spring cleaning" on the site design and user experience.What will this mean to you? Well, it means you'll see some things about the site design evolving to be more consistent across the site. And some things that haven't worked as smoothly as we would have liked them to will get the attention they deserve. Lastly, we may determine that some things we tried out just didn't fly and remove them from the site.We'll be using a number of inputs to build our "to do" list: usage data that shows the things you use the most versus things that very few people use; usability testing that can help us understand what's broken that needs fixing; and, last but not least, we'd like to hear from you directly...What would you want to see fixed on the site? What would you remove completely, if you could? We'll use your feedback to help prioritise what we focus on, so we can all experience a cleaner, easier-to-use YouTube.Please enter your feedback here and/or browse and vote on ideas others have had. We'll take a few weeks to digest your comments and will respond directly to the ideas you're most excited about.Margaret Stewart, User Experience Manager, recently favorited "Christmas Tree Rocketry: The Art and Science of Holiday Recycling."
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