Items tagged with YouTube
When the average American likely thinks of a hardcore gamer, they likely picture some nerdy kid with a beard and a ponytail living in his mom's basement. However, the world of professional Ninja, aka Tyler Blevins, is a 27-year-old Fortnite beast that has not only helped to popularize the incredibly prolific game, but has amassed a huge following on his two social media platforms of choice: YouTube and Twitch. On YouTube, has nearly 21 million subscribers. On Twitch, he has 12.8 million followers. Ninja’s “street cred” skyrocketed back in March 2018 when he teamed up...
Read more...
Yesterday, a story critical of Google was making the rounds purported to be from a former intern that worked on the Microsoft Edge team. Joshua Bakita detailed one particular instance in which Google allegedly altered site code to make Google apps/website either not render properly or perform poorly on competing browsers. "For example, they recently added a hidden empty div over YouTube videos that causes our hardware acceleration fast-path to bail," wrote Bakita. "Prior to that, our fairly state-of-the-art video acceleration put us well ahead of Chrome on video playback time on battery,...
Read more...
YouTube has been pushing its upscale YouTube Music and YouTube Premium services since it hacked YouTube Red into two parts last May. The streaming video giant is now reaching out to students by offering lower-cost subscription plans to YouTube Music Premium and YouTube Premium; both are ad-free streaming services. Under the new payment plans, Students can get YouTube Music Premium for $4.99 per month, a discount of $5 monthly. YouTube Premium will cost students $6.99 per month rather than the $11.99 monthly rate it charged before. Students that sign up before January 31, 2019, can get...
Read more...
If you are looking for something to watch on a lazy Sunday afternoon, YouTube is showing some top-tier Hollywood films in their entirety, but you do have to sit through some commercials to watch them for free. Among the free movies, you can watch are the sci-fi classic The Terminator, Rocky, and newer films like Legally Blonde. These free, feature-length movies are offered in the Movies section of YouTube and have been there since October. YouTube has sold movies in that section of its website for years. This marks the first time that YouTube has offered free streaming films in exchange for users...
Read more...
As much as we like Nintendo's hybrid Switch console for gaming, there is not much in the way of non-gaming entertainment, and certainly not on the level of an Xbox One or PlayStation 4. If the latest rumor has any truth to it, however, Nintendo might be starting to change that with the introduction of a YouTube app, perhaps as early as this week. The streaming situation on the Switch is underwhelming at the moment. Nintendo launched the console with not just a limited catalog of games (which has since been rectified), but also a lack of any streaming video services. That changed a year ago this...
Read more...
Over the years, Plex has grown to become a feature-packed multimedia hub for people looking to cut the cord. From its support for news programming, live over-the-air programming with DVR support, and the usual staples like local- and internet-based streaming of music, movies and TV shows; Plex seemingly does it all. Today, however, the company has announced yet another new extension to the platform, and it's called Plex Web Shows. Currently available in beta, this free service provides unlimited on-demand programming that you can view from anywhere. Plex is quick to point out that you...
Read more...
We have all been down the rabbit hole that is the Internet. It starts with a simple search, perhaps a lookup of the weather for the weekend, and then hours later you find yourself streaming "Little Joe Sure Can Sing" by Joe Ritchie, who you found out is actually Joe Pesci from Goodfellas fame. And woe is you if you trip into a endless sea of YouTube videos. How do you possibly climb out if that happens? We're not sure, to be honest, though Google is now throwing users a lifeline of sorts by showing you how much time you spend watching videos. This is a new feature that is rolling out to user profiles,...
Read more...
Google has been working on a dark mode for its YouTube app for a long time now, after having rolled it out to the web and then later to Apple's iOS platform. Well, guess what? Android users finally have access to it as well, and can join the dark side. It's not clear if Google has enabled the dark theme on all Android devices just yet, but it is available on at least some of them. The dark theme option started appearing on Android devices as we headed into last weekend. Some users report having seen it enabled automatically when firing up YouTube on their smartphones, along with a pop-up notifying...
Read more...
Have you noticed that YouTube pages appear to load slower in Edge, Firefox, and Safari compared to Google's own Chrome browser? If so, you are not alone. Google redesigned the YouTube experience last year, but the site still uses an older shadow API that is only used in Chrome, which makes other browsers render YouTube much slower. Chris Peterson, a program manager at Mozilla, noticed the performance disparity and posted about the topic on Twitter. According to Peterson, the YouTube page loads five times slower in those other browsers "because YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated...
Read more...
Google is taking a hatchet to its YouTube Red service and carving it into two new services. One will be called YouTube Music, which as it sounds is a music streaming service, and the other will be called YouTube Premium. It's all a little confusing, especially since Google already maintains a subscription music streaming service called Google Play Music, so we're here to offer some clarity on what's happening. In a nutshell, Google is attempting to compete with the likes of Spotify and Apple Music in the music streaming space. Part of what's confusing is that YouTube Music already exists in select...
Read more...
A new rumor is going around that focuses on the fate of Google Play Music. According to the source, Google Play Music will die once YouTube Remix launches. The rumor claims that all current users of Play Music will be forced to migrate to YouTube Remix by the end of the year. YouTube Remix was tipped to be something akin to Spotify, the leader in the streaming music market. One big difference between Spotify and Remix will be that Remix will allow users to play video along with the music and will reportedly have a better recommendation engine. Google has already worked out the details with...
Read more...
YouTube announced that last quarter its software helped to pull down millions of objectionable videos before any users were able to view them. The machine learning software that helped YouTube to pull this off has been trained with the assistance of human moderators and has made policing the crush of new videos uploaded daily easier. YouTube has offered up hard numbers noting that it has pulled down 8 million videos in the last quarter and that of that number most were spam or adult content videos. Of that 8 million, 6.7 million were first flagged by computers. YouTube has been targeting violent...
Read more...
Hey, good news everyone, Google is going to be serving up more ads through YouTube in between music videos! Isn't that awesome? Wait, you're not stoked? Well then, that is unfortunate, because apparently the video streaming site will forge ahead with showing a greater number of ads to some users. It's part of an effort to get more people to subscribe to YouTube's music service. Lyor Cohen, YouTube's head of music, told Bloomberg that the ad campaign will primarily target people who mostly use YouTube as a music service. These are people who passively listen to music on YouTube for long periods...
Read more...
Thanks to the help of machine learning, creating great looking video is easier than ever. It even seems to be getting easier at an accelerated pace lately, and for those who don't have preexisting tools or skills to get a desired effect, it's a big advantage. Sometimes, cost of upgrade equipment might be a limiting factor, but other times, it could simply be skill level, or lack of time to invest in learning those skills. So, Google continues to help video creators of all levels. With technology simply called "mobile real-time video segmentation", Google uses machine learning to help separate the...
Read more...
