Testing, testing...YouTube begins trial of new live streaming platform

From U2 to the Indian Premier League to the White House to E3, we've worked closely with our partners to give you a front row seat to a wide array of live events. Today and tomorrow, tune in as we open a new chapter of YouTube live streaming. Starting at 8:00 a.m. PT, we will begin a limited trial of a new live streaming platform in conjunction with four of our partners: Howcast, Next New Networks, Rocketboom and Young Hollywood.

This new platform integrates live streaming directly into YouTube channels; all broadcasters need is a webcam or external USB/FireWire camera. Included in the test is a “Live Comments” module which lets you engage with the broadcaster and the broader YouTube community. For the purpose of the trial, this offering will only be available today and tomorrow. Based on the results of this initial test, we’ll evaluate rolling out the platform more broadly to our partners worldwide.

Check out all the live broadcasts via the interactive schedule below, and feel free to share this schedule across the web via the embed functionality. Bear with us as we test this new platform as there may be some bumps along the way. Please share your feedback in the comments section below (though note that the section is moderated due to spam). Thanks!

Joshua Siegel, Product Manager, and Christopher Hamilton, Product Marketing Manager, recently watched "Fun with Google Instant - We Didn't Start the Fire."

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Upload limit increases to 15 minutes for all users

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!

Joshua Siegel, Product Manager, Upload and Video Management, recently watched "Gulf - Jack Conte VideoSong."

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Lock and Load: It's Life in a Day

What are you doing today? Something routine like cooking breakfast or taking the dog for a walk? Or is it something extraordinary like your child's first soccer game or your wedding day?

Whatever it is, big or small, we hope you’ll capture it on video and take part in "Life in a Day," a user-generated documentary that will tell the story of a single day on Earth, as seen through your eyes. You have until 11:59 p.m. local time to film something, so get going. For more information, visit the Life in a Day channel.

Get out those cameras and let's make film history!

Nate Weinstein, Entertainment Marketing, just watched "The Film Editor’s How-To Guide for Life in a Day."

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Release Notes: processing status, share to Buzz, and more

Before we head into the holiday weekend, wanted to update you on a couple of things that went down in sunny San Bruno recently:

Processing progress status: Those of you who upload know that there's a short period of time between uploading a video and it being visible on the site. The new processing percentage under the video preview lets you know when your video is ready for the world to see.

AutoShare to Buzz: Over four million people are already AutoSharing to Facebook, Twitter, Orkut or Google Reader, and now you can automatically share your YouTube likes, favorites, comments, subscriptions and uploads to your Buzz network, too. You can still keep YouTube as a connected site in Buzz if you hooked it up previously, but that only automatically posts your uploads for now. For more about AutoShare, click here.

Results badging: Our search results page has had a light makeover. Instead of bold headers separating channels, videos and playlist results, we've introduced new, compact badges to more clearly indicate the content type, as so:

New captions feature: The interactive captions viewer allows people to read ahead in the caption stream and jump to a specific segment within a video with captions. Captions are a key part of making YouTube accessible to all.

Have a great one!

The YouTube Team

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Release notes: five new languages, email alerts, share to Buzz and Blogger

What better way to celebrate the weekend than with these recent adds and enhancements:

Language offering grows: There are five new languages in which YouTube can be experienced: Greek, Hungarian, Finnish, Danish and Norwegian. Simply scroll to the bottom of any page, find where it says "Language" and click on your current language to access the full menu of options, including our five most recent additions:

Email alerts: We're experimenting with a new form of subscription alerts. Now, when you subscribe to a channel (or edit your subscription to an existing channel), you can elect to receive an email the instant the person you're subscribed to uploads a new video. This will appeal to people who check their email more frequently than they log in to YouTube (though we've never heard of such people *wink*) but who also want to know immediately when their favorite content creators upload new work.

Refreshed look for search results page: When you do a search, you'll see we tightened up the typography on the results page. We're using a consistent size and color to establish the basic look, and then we're adding a bit of color and bolding to bring more prominence to certain elements, such as view count. 

New sharing options: Click the "share" button underneath any video and you'll see two new platforms to effortlessly share videos to: Google Buzz and Blogger. Try it!

New upload interface: When you click on the Upload button, you may notice that things look a little different. As with our redesigned video page and as part of our larger "spring cleaning" effort, a main goal was to streamline the look and functionality of the upload page. We toned down some of the colors and moved the Webcam option to a more prominent position next to the upload button. We also made it easier to find information about how to upload directly from your mobile phone.

Player changes: As many of you have noticed, the video player is transforming, too. We've just fully released a new player design for all videos without ads. The goal is for the player to be as subtle as possible so that the video itself shines and doesn't have to compete with the stuff around it. We'll be following this roll-out with player upgrades for videos with ads and then for embedded videos.

Improvements to YouTube-on-iPad: There's a great native YouTube app on the iPad, but we've also made some changes to how the YouTube website functions on the device. Among the improvements: we created a grid layout for the home screen, search results and other video lists, and devised a new layout for the video page, with the video playing right in the page.

The YouTube Team

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Five Days Left to Submit in Round 1 of Project: Report

The deadline is quickly approaching in the first round of Project: Report 2010, a journalism contest done in partnership with the Pulitzer Center for non-professional, aspiring journalists to tell stories in their community that might not otherwise be be told.

The assignment for Round 1 is to document a single day in the life of a compelling person the world should meet and showcase how that person is making a positive impact in his or her community. All videos must be three minutes or less, and the deadline for submissions is this Sunday, February 28, 2010.

Ten finalists will be chosen from the pool of Round 1 submissions by a panel of judges at the Pulitzer Center. Each finalist for Project: Report -- which is made possible by Sony and Intel -- will receive a Sony VAIO notebook with the new 2010 Intel Core i7 processor and a Sony HD video camera and proceed to the second and final round, where they will compete for five $10,000 travel fellowships to work with the Pulitzer Center on an international reporting project.

All five winners will also receive invitations to Washington, D.C., for a public screening of their work and the chance to participate in a special workshop with Pulitzer Center journalists.

You still have time to put together your Day in the Life piece if you get going today -- so find that person, tell their story, and submit your video on youtube.com/projectreport by Sunday.

We look forward to seeing your entries.

Olivia Ma, News & Politics Manager, recently watched "Arturo's Jerusalem Vlog: Episode One."

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New Thumbnail "Flipbook" in Upload Shows Video Processing Progress

Starting today, when you upload a video to YouTube, you'll see a rapid-fire assortment of thumbnails from the video after it begins uploading to the site. Aside from being fun to watch (it's kind of like a flipbook of your video!), this visual representation of the process gives you further peace of mind that the video is indeed processing and will soon be live on the site.

Shortly after the last thumbnail arrives, your video is ready for viewing and sharing.* If you see the flipbook soon after you begin uploading, this means your video will be processed faster and you won't have to wait long for your video link. Read on for recommendations on how to optimize your video file to do this.

If you're uploading in the .mov or .mp4 (aka Quicktime) format, and you produced your video using Final Cut Pro, iMovie or QuicktimePro, click here to learn how to optimize your files. By ensuring the "index" of your file is in front, we can process your video faster. This is referred to by some as "flattening" a file or creating a "fast start" video file. If you're using FLV, ASF or WMV formats, you're fine. If you're using AVI, we'd want that index in front of the file as well. Most digital cameras producing AVI or MVI formats are fine.

How can you tell if your file is a "fast start file" or not? If you start getting the thumbnails before the upload has completed, then this is a fast start video file. If you get the thumbnails after the upload has completed, then your video file is not a fast start video file.

Dima Broyde, Software Engineer, recently watched "Арефьева Ольга "Театр," and Slave Jovanovski, Software Engineer, recently watched "Pomplamoose Covers Makin Out by Mark Owen."

*Remember, you can always check the processing status of your videos by mousing over your username in the top right and then clicking "My Videos" in the dropdown menu.

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