youtube Archives - Argyll Free Press

YouTube Joins the T-Mobile Binge On Program

March 18, 2016 By Kenneth Scott Leave a Comment

Ever since its inception, the T-Mobile Binge On Program has been a rather controversial and highly disputed feature that the carrier decided to offer and hold onto even up to this day. The reason it achieved this very tender and disputable position was the result of numerous activists claiming that the program was not respecting the rules of net neutrality from more than one perspective.

In essence, T-Mobile’s Binge On Program offered unlimited data for users to spend on the select partnered services. As an example, as long as you used Hulu for video streaming, you could watch to your heart’s content, without ever needing to fear exceeding your data limit.

The catch – something that did not calm the waters down by any means whatsoever – was that the unlimited streaming would only be available at a lower quality with videos normally capping at 480p, for example.

But apparently, while some parties joined into the debate whether what T-Mobile is doing is equitable from net neutrality’s perspective or not and still remain dedicated to their opinion, others had a change of heart. While in December last year, YouTube was accusing the American carrier of throttling data and downright violating FCC rules and regulations, yesterday brought some very surprising news.

Apparently, YouTube and Google Play Movies will soon become available on the Binge On program. The reason behind the sudden change of opinion is unclear, although Google discussed their own analysis of the situation before deciding to join forces with T-Mobile. According to the tech giant, the two delicate issues that T-Mobile was touching down on previous have been addressed, meaning that the improved services that the Binge On program offers now are on par with the quality standards expected.

Meanwhile, the program has been made easier to use for customers too; you can now easily turn it on or off through texting and very basic app navigation. At the same time, signing up for Binge On will let you know exactly what the details of the deal are.

What this means for T-Mobile, considering that two gigantic names are, in essence joining sides with the carrier, is that the controversy and dispute of their practice may finally come to an end.

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Inbuilt Blurring Tool Is Now Available on YouTube

February 26, 2016 By Cristopher Hall Leave a Comment

In order to help out video creators with post-production issues that may come up in the last second, an inbuilt blurring tool is now available on YouTube. Basically anything that you realize is not supposed to be in your video after you’ve completed recording and editing it, such as car plates, particular faces, objects, or ‘wardrobe malfunctions’ – as YouTube itself puts it – can be blurred out immediately. It’s a great alternative to having to reshoot scenes or dealing with the unfortunate event where someone decides they want to be taken out of a video just after you’re done with it.

The number of content creators on YouTube is constantly increasing, with more and more people deciding to undertake one or more types of video content to their channel. Whether it’s vlogs, social experiments, interviews or even the amateur-level variety, the blurring tool can give creators a last-minute fix to anything that may simply risk ruining your video.

And because you may not even be able to recapture the essence of the original video once again – which is usually the case with a lot of spontaneous shots – this new addition is small but amazingly useful.

A less advanced form of the blurring tool has been part of the offered tools by YouTube before, too. Starting with 2012, the platform offered creators a way to blur faces but they would be limited to that. Now, the tool is a lot more dynamic and easier to use. You can straight out just pause a video, use the box selection tool around the item you wish to blur and then let it run by itself. The drawn selection box will continue to follow the selected object as it detects it moving in the video.

While the proprietary motion tracking algorithms that YouTube has will continue blurring the object that you selected, you will have to manually select the duration that you wish to keep that object selected for. Similarly, you can ensure that the selected area is static and doesn’t follow a particular object. This can be done via the “Lock” option. Similarly, the option can be applied to more than just one object or face present in the video, meaning that you can have multiple blurs happening at the same time, whether the subjects are in motion or not.

This new tool allows creators to protect both their videos and the people featuring in them. It’s a very small yet tremendously useful tool as it can help with preventing claim trademark infringement as well as protecting identities and private data.

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YouTube Virtual Movie Theatre for Android

November 6, 2015 By Roxanne Briean Leave a Comment

The YouTube Virtual Movie Theatre is a means to bridge more users to join the ever-growing virtual reality fan-base. With the Virtual Movie Theatre for Android, which is available for everyone as of today, comes a new and awesome feature that plans to immerse the audience into the VR medium even more.

Now, users can experience 3D videos while streaming them on YouTube – via Google’s Cardboard.

This isn’t the first time YouTube has meddled with 3D videos. At the dawn of 2015, it introduced support for 360-degree vids on their platform. YouTube’s entire library is up for grabs to whomever wishes to stream videos in VR straight to their Google Cardboard – read, every user-uploaded content available.

To use YouTube’s new Virtual Movie Theatre feature, just tap on the Cardboard option and slide your smartphone into the headset so it can start streaming. The video you’ll be watching is going to be presented in the manner of a movie theatre. It will adjust accordingly to your position.

YouTube brags that it has a massive amount of 360-degree videos. Ranging from incredible concert experiences, movie trailers, short walks in the nature – read, a day at the beach, a lovely stroll in the forest and so on.

Basically, everything that the world has to offer can come right to your uhm, face, I guess.

These video techniques that YouTube uses, the company claims, are akin to how an individual, just like yourself, perceives his, or hers, surroundings. If an object is far far away, then it will appear so. If sound is coming from within a box, then it will be perceived as muffled.

YouTube has its own VR curated video playlist filled with world jumps, movie trailers – The Hunger Games; a music video – Waiting for Love by Avicci; and, one of my personal favourites, walking inside Minecraft.

Yet, unfortunately, these new features are only available for users that have an Android smartphone. The company has announced that it will roll their VR experiences to the iOS medium soon – but we don’t have an exact date.

Considering that there are more than 1 million Google Cardboard owners, we should expect more VR experiences from YouTube.

Guess what? The New York Times is shipping 1.3. million Google Cardboard headsets during this weekend because their new VR documentary, called The Displaced, is about to make its big début.

This opens up another door – one for advertisers. Meaning that from an economic point of view, VR is a potentially huge market, so it makes sense for big tech companies to pump cash into content creation. The more companies willing do create high-quality content, the better the competition.

Things are shaping nicely for virtual reality – also with the help of the new YouTube Virtual Movie Theatre platform.

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New Premium Content Pay-Per-View Youtube

October 19, 2015 By Roxanne Briean Leave a Comment

Pessimists, start rolling out your “All good things come to an end” banners and get ready to march in protest. Optimists… good luck tryin’ to convince the pessimists otherwise. Because this time, they might actually not be exaggerating.

It turns out Youtube has decided to take the big, and sadly economically predictable step of introducing premium content in the well known pay-per-view manner that is probably loved only by well-to-do people who have tons of money and don’t care how they spend them. Certainly not the riff-raff mostly teenage broke-unless-I-get-my-allowance Internauts that were and are Youtube’s main audience.

In short, only if you pay a 10$/month subscription, you’ll have the option of seeing brand new content by several media companies. So far announced: 21st Century Fox’s Fox Sports, Comcast’s NBCUniversal, A+E Networks Inc. and Time Warner’s Turner cable unit, and even a rumored Disney, which is not yet confirmed.

Youtube assures us that those who aren’t willing to pay for the subscription will still be able to see the free videos, which will be uploaded in the usual manner on the free part of the website. But as a personal opinion, this whole duality of free and pay-per-view content can only bode ill for a site whose main asset and attraction was specifically the “free”, user-created content part, even with the annoying ads that came with the deal, so that it could be economically viable.

Speaking of which, said ads will NOT be part of the subscription paying users’ experience, but everybody else will still have to bear with them. Lovely. So, in effect, Youtube has not replaced one way of getting funds (the ads) with a new one. It has added a new way of making money to the old one. A risky maneuver, considering a fair number of users employ ad blockers when using Youtube, which would imply that they are interested solely in the video-sharing that stood at the company’s foundation and not in the commercial dimensions of an ads or pay-per-view Youtube.

But Youtube seems to know what its doing and is pretty determined, judging by the fact that industry sources expected to see this subscription service launched at the end of last September. Currently, the estimated time for some of the new premium content to become live on the site is 2016, but an exact date or an explanation as to why this delay from last month occurred were not given by a Youtube representative when asked.

And granted, the 2 classes of free and paying users could coexist in this new pay-per-view Youtube, with the former simply opting to ignore the new content. If the free one lasts.

What are your thoughts on this move?

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Introducing YouTube Gaming, Twitch’s Competitor

August 29, 2015 By Michael Turner Leave a Comment

YouTube Gaming is Twitch’s main competitor. YouTube was already a big player, but Google doesn’t want it to become old and stale. The big G, starting with the 26th of August, has begun promoting YouTube Gaming as a separate dedicated website and app aimed at, go figure, gaming.

Users who want Call of Duty search results won’t have to go through Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe.

Yet, this wasn’t the main problem.

Esports popularity has grown tremendously over the past five years and Twitch was the main hub for it. Google can’t let this happen. If they succeed in their endeavor, if the company manages to separate different gaming content, they can rest assured that people will use it.

If you build it, they will come.

Lui Calibre, whose site has 3.5 million subscribers, holds a cookie in the shape of the YouTube Gaming App’s heart logo. Photo: Susan Karlin.

YouTube Gaming resembles Netflix when it comes to watching a stream. It stays true to it roots, but you won’t notice the vanilla components that made the video service popular. Comments can be seen on the side, you can give a streamer either a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down and you can subscribe to their channel.

It’s really not that hard to use, and I’m inclined to think that the main YouTube page would benefit from looking like this.

The biggest difference lies in its essence. It’s gaming-oriented. There’s a list where you can see what games are trending, there are featured channels, and there are even landing pages for certain games.

Results are divided into categories like live shows, popular videos and pre-recorded Let’s Play vids.

The Android app looks a lot like Twitch’s, but its desktop counterpart is more fine-detailed. It looks sleeker, better organized and easier to use.

But this isn’t how you poach users from Twitch. Better features and great content creators will, however. The benefit of rewinding a stream in case you’ve missed its beginning is definitely a start.

Currently, Twitch’s most viewed channel racks-up approximately 32,000 viewers. YouTube’s most popular channel has around 11,000 – these may be users who are just trying out the service. Also, because YouTube features channels on its front page.

People don’t think of YouTube as a live streaming hub, but they’re starting to.

YouTube Gaming - PewDiePie Content Creator

Felix Kjellberg aka PewDiePie

Let’s take PewDiePie. He’s a huge part of YouTube and YouTube Gaming. He creates content especially for the video service. Because he uses Google’s video platform as his second home, he keeps people coming back.

If Felix Kjellberg decides to leave for Twitch, the majority of his fan-base will leave along with him. I’m curious to see if dividing YouTube in two will be worthwhile for Google, or if it’s a big mistake.

What do you think? Is Google making a mistake? Will Twitch reign supreme? Tell us in the comments section down below.

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Google is Set to Launch YouTube Gaming for Streamers

June 15, 2015 By Nancy Young Leave a Comment

Google has just officially announced that they will tackle video game streaming with their new YouTube Gaming. It feels like a direct attack to Twitch and their service.

Google’s new platform will add all of Twitch’s features, while sporting a few new ideas of its own. Gamers will be able to share their original content as easily as they would have on Twitch.

YouTube Gaming is set to launch sometime this Summer, and users can be a part of the new platform by sharing Let’s Play content, and other live streams, in a different hub – separate from YouTube itself.

According to product manager Alan Joyce, and his statement on the YouTube official blog – ” YouTube Gaming is built to be all about favorite games and gamers, with more videos than anywhere else. From Asteroids to Zelda, more than 25,000 games will each have their own page, a single place for all the best videos and live streams about that titles. You’ll also find channels from a wide array of game publishers and YouTube creators.”

Alan also added that their new platform will be centred around live streaming, but the company doesn’t discourage gamers to upload their original content. As you might have known already, YouTube Gaming will let gamers easily live stream at 60 frames per second, automatically converting their video without problems.

The platform’s in-built search engine will be modified around games, so if you are to search for Lego, you’ll get Lego Worlds, and other Lego related game results, and not videos about the real-life Lego bricks.

YouTube Gaming will be Twitch’s direct challenger, which is now the go-to place for video-game streamers around the world. Twitch is owned by Amazon, and their latest report states that they have a monthly audience of over 100 million viewers at the end of 2014.

Google will be present at this year’s E3 conference, and they will most likely detail their new live streaming platform. What we do know at the moment is that their new service will be launched in the US, and UK. For those of you living in Europe, don’t despair, the platform will come eventually – maybe even at the end of 2015, but rumours have it that it will be released sometime in the early 2016.

PewDiePie is the most known Let’s Play streamer.

It is unknown at the moment if Google will offer this service to Asia, Australia, or other zones.

If you want to be notified about details regarding YouTube Gaming, follow their official channel on Twitter – it’s up and running!

I can’t wait to stream playing The Witcher 3 – I need to let people know how much Roach sucks, and what a bad horsey he is!

Are you going to change venues from Twitch to YouTube? Tell us in the comments section below!

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How to Make a YouTube Viral Video and Retrospective

February 26, 2015 By Roxanne Briean Leave a Comment

Tip

Try to make a video of things that other people can’t do. For instance, being able to make a dunk is pretty cool but this can be seen by anyone watching basketball. Being able to make a dunk over the head of a friend is a lot more impressive and rare.

So now that you’ve seen how to get famous on YouTube let’s take a look at the 10 years retrospective of viral videos on YouTube.

We hope you enjoyed our little guide, we wish you the best of luck and we really hope to see you reach stardom on YouTube. Have fun and take care.

Image source: youtube.com

Film a practical joke or a prank

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Record a lip-sync video

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Record a family moment

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Participate in a meme video

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Show off your talent

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