Author Archives: John G. Doe

A YouTube built just for music

Usher discovers Bieber. Psy breaks a billion. Macklemore goes from the garage to the Grammys. Pentatonix top the charts. Over the past ten years, music on YouTube has been magic. We’ve seen established artists reach new heights and new artists explode on the scene. We’ve seen our fans shake, get happy and let it go. And together, they’ve made YouTube the absolute best place in the world to discover new music.

Today, any artist can upload a video to YouTube and get discovered by over 1 billion people around the globe. That global exposure has allowed YouTube and Google to pay out over $3 billion to the record industry to date. But it’s also provided an incredible source of promotion for artists, helping fuel ticket sales, move merchandise, and boost album and song downloads. Just this month, Adele’s “Hello” became the fastest rising video of the year on YouTube, while also breaking the record for first week download sales.

But we want to do even more to support artists and all the fans who turn to YouTube to discover music, so we’re making the experience even better with a brand new YouTube Music app. With YouTube Music, you’ll get a completely new type of experience, designed to make discovering music on YouTube easier than ever.


No matter where you start in the app, the music will never stop. Every song you play or artist you choose will take you on an endless journey through YouTube’s music catalog. A simple tap and you’re on your way, enjoying your favorite music and discovering new artists effortlessly. The home tab will recommend tracks just for you and create personalized stations based on your tastes.

The app also gives you complete access to one of the richest music catalogs on earth. You’ll be able to quickly find music videos, tracks, artists and albums, but you’ll also see all the remixes, covers, lyric videos and concert footage that YouTube has to offer.

And you can also amplify your experience with a YouTube Red membership. With YouTube Red, you’ll get to experience all that the Music app has to offer without ads. You’ll also have the ability to listen to music offline and seamlessly switch between video or audio-only (so you can decide whether you actually watch Silentó whip and nae nae). And also be able to hear any video play, even when you’re in another app or have your screen turned off.

You can download YouTube Music starting today in the U.S. on the Google Play store or the App Store and as a special treat, get the amplified experience for free for 14 days. We can’t wait for you to download YouTube Music and see where the music takes you!

T. Jay Fowler, Director, Product Management, recently watched “Low - Try to Sleep”

Source: YouTube Blog


Smoother <video> in Chrome

Video quality matters, and when an HD or HFR playback isn’t smooth, we notice. Chrome noticed. YouTube noticed. So we got together to make YouTube video playback smoother in Chrome, and we call it Project Butter.


For some context, our brains fill in the motion in between frames if each frame is onscreen the same amount of time - this is called motion interpolation. In other words, a 30 frames per second video won’t appear smooth unless each frame is spaced evenly each 1/30th of a second. Smoothness is more complicated than just this - you can read more about it in this article by Michael Abrash at Valve.


Frame rates, display refresh rates and cadence
Your device’s screen redraws itself at a certain frame rate. Videos present frames at a certain rate. These rates are often not the same. At YouTube we commonly see videos authored at 24, 25, 29.97, 30, 48, 50, 59.94, and 60 frames per second (fps) and these videos are viewed on displays with different refresh rates - the most common being 50Hz (Europe) and 60Hz (USA).  


For a video to be smooth we need to figure out the best, most regular way to display the frames - the best cadence. The ideal cadence is calculated as the ratio of the display rate to frame rate. For example, if we have a 60Hz display (a 1/60 second display interval) and a 30 fps clip, 60 / 30 == 2 which means each video frame should be displayed for two display intervals of total duration 2 * 1/60 second.


We played videos a bunch of different ways and scored them on smoothness.  


Smoothness score
Using off the shelf HDMI capture hardware and some special video clips we computed a percentage score based on the number of times each video frame was displayed relative to a calculated optimal display count. The higher the score, the more frames aligned with the optimal display frequency. Below is a figure showing how Chrome 43 performed when playing a 30fps clip back on a 60Hz display:


Smoothness: 68.49%, ~Dropped: 5 / 900 (0.555556%)


The y-axis is the number of times each frame was displayed, while the x-axis is the frame number. As mentioned previously the calculated ideal display count for a 30fps clip on a 60Hz display is 2. So, in an ideal situation, the graph should be a flat horizontal line at 2, yet Chrome dropped many frames and displayed certain frames for as many as 4 display cycles! The smoothness score reflects this -  only 68.49 percent of frames were displayed correctly. How could we track down what was going on?


Using some of the performance tracing tools built into Chrome, we identified timing issues inherent to the existing design for video rendering as the culprit. These issues resulted in both missed and irregular video frames on a regular basis.



There were two main problems in the interactions between Chrome’s compositor (responsible for drawing frames) and its media pipeline (responsible for generating frames) --  
  1. The compositor didn’t have a timely way of knowing when a video frame needed display. Video frames were selected on the media pipeline thread while the compositor would occasionally come along looking for them on the compositor thread, but if the compositor thread was busy it wouldn’t get the notification on time.
  2. Chrome’s media pipeline didn’t know when the compositor would be ready to draw its next new frame. This led to the media pipeline sometimes picking a frame that was too old by the time the compositor displayed it.


In Chrome 44, we re-architected the media and compositor pipelines to communicate carefully about the intent to generate and display. Additionally, we also improved which video frames to pick by using the optimal display count information. With these changes, Chrome 44 significantly improved on smoothness scores across all video frame rates and display refresh rates:
Smoothness: 99.33%, ~Dropped: 0 / 900 (0.000000%)


Smooth like butter. Read more in public design document, if you’re interested in further details.


Dale Curtis, Software Engineer, recently watched WARNING: SCARIEST GAME IN YEARS | Five Nights at Freddy's - Part 1
Richard Leider, Engineering Manager, recently watched Late Art Tutorial.
Renganathan Ramamoorthy, Product Manager, recently watched Video Game High School

YouTube presses play on virtual reality

If we’ve learned anything in the past 10+ years at YouTube it’s that capturing and sharing videos is a great way to bring people there with you—whether “there” is an Icelandic glacier, a special performance by violinist Tim Fain, or just a friend’s birthday party.

Virtual reality (VR) makes the experience of being there even more awesome and immersive, so today we’re bringing two new VR features to YouTube’s Android app. All you need is your current phone, and a Google Cardboard viewer.

First, YouTube now supports VR video—a brand new kind of video that makes you feel like you’re actually there. Using the same tricks that we humans use to see the world, VR video gives you a sense of depth as you look around in every direction. Near things look near, far things look far. So if you were excited about 360° videos, this is pretty freakin’ cool.

To give it a try just find a VR video on YouTube—like the Hunger Games Experience or TOMS Shoes Giving Trip—tap the new Cardboard icon, drop your phone into your Cardboard viewer, and you’re off! If you’re a creator, you can also check out technologies like Jump to capture and share your own VR videos.
Our second bit of news is for the universe of existing YouTube content. And that’s the fact that you can now watch any video using Google Cardboard, and experience a kind of virtual movie theater. Just select the new “Cardboard” option from the watch page menu, drop your phone into your viewer, and you’re done. You’ll now have the largest VR content library right at your fingertips.
Both of today’s updates make it easier to be there. In some cases, really there there. So download the new YouTube app from Google Play, and get going.

Kurt Wilms, Senior Product Manager, YouTube VR recently watched “Waves of Grace”, Sanjeev Verma, YouTube Product Manager, recently watched “LA Phil: The Orchestra VR Video Experience” and Husain Bengali, Product Manager, Jump recently watched “Apollo 11 moon landing.

Source: YouTube Blog


Rewriting the code for girls in CS

When it comes to computer science, millions of girls are being left out of the conversation. Despite earning the majority of bachelor's degrees in the U.S., women earn fewer than 20 percent of computer science degrees, with serious implications for our economy and for women at large.

The problem of getting girls more interested in tech has many sources, but according to Google’s own research, one of them is optics. Girls don’t see positive role models of other girls and women in popular culture. In a study of popular films in 11 countries, fewer than 20 percent of computer science or tech roles were held by women.

As someone who runs a company at the intersection of technology and media, I want to help change the perceptions of women and technology we see today. So, as part of our Made with Code and media perception initiatives, I’m excited that we’re supporting award-winning documentary filmmaker Lesley Chilcott—of “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Waiting for Superman” fame—on her next film, “CODEGIRL.”

“CODEGIRL” follows the story of 5,000 girls from 60 countries as they compete in a global entrepreneurship and coding competition by Technovation. The girls have three months to develop an app that attempts to solve a problem in their local community. In the film, they size up their competition, interact with teachers and local mentors, learn to code, and pitch their ideas all in hopes of winning $10,000 in funding and support.

Starting today and until November 5, Lesley’s film will be available for free on YouTube, before its theatrical debut in the next few weeks. You can watch the film below and use the hashtag #rallyforcodegirl to show your support.


Our goal is to inspire as many students as possible during this special five-day free viewing period before it hits theaters. With your help, we’ll be able to inspire more girls around the world to pursue their passions in tech.

Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, recently watched "American Kids Try Candy from Around the World - Episode 4."

Source: YouTube Blog


YouTube Red is here

For ten years, you’ve made YouTube an incredible place---a global community of over 1 billion people that gives anyone the power to create something that everyone can watch. The good news is, that isn’t changing. The free, ad-supported YouTube isn’t going anywhere.

And we've got some more good news. Starting today, YouTube Red goes live in the U.S., giving you a new way to watch YouTube, while still supporting your favorite creators.

With a YouTube Red membership, you’ll experience YouTube without video ads, be able to save videos to watch offline, and play videos in the background on your mobile device, all for $9.99 a month. And just like with our advertising revenue, the majority of revenue we get from YouTube Red memberships will go to our creator community.

Your Red membership works anywhere you sign into YouTube, whether it’s across mobile devices, desktop, connected TVs, or on our recently launched Gaming app or our upcoming Music app. And as a special bonus, YouTube Red comes with Google Play Music, so subscribe to one and automatically get access to the other. Starting early next year, YouTube Red will get even better with access to new, original series and movies from some of your favorite creators.

And just to give you a feel for an uninterrupted YouTube experience, anyone in the U.S. can sign up for a free 30-day trial. You can learn more at youtube.com/red.

Soon, you’ll be watching what you want, when you want, on any device you want, uninterrupted.

Matt Leske, Senior Product Manager, recently watched “Bali Road Trip in 4K! - #onedayoffline.”

Source: YouTube Blog


Meet YouTube Red, the ultimate YouTube experience

For years, YouTube’s fans have been telling us they want more—more choice when watching their favorite content, more ways to support their favorite creators and, above all, the option to watch their favorite videos uninterrupted.

On October 28, we’re giving fans exactly what they want. Introducing YouTube Red -- a new membership designed to provide you with the ultimate YouTube experience.

YouTube Red lets you enjoy videos across all of YouTube without ads, while also letting you save videos to watch offline on your phone or tablet and play videos in the background, all for $9.99 a month. Your membership extends across devices and anywhere you sign into YouTube, including our recently launched Gaming app and a brand new YouTube Music app we’re announcing today that will be available soon.

YouTube Music is designed to make discovering, watching and listening to music easier than ever. Any song or artist you choose on YouTube Music will start you on a personal journey through one of the richest music catalogs; just sign in, tap a track you love, and see where your music takes you. And as a special bonus - YouTube Red works with Google Play Music, so subscribe to one and automatically get access to the other.

And starting early next year, YouTube Red will get even better with member-only access to new, original shows and movies from some of YouTube’s biggest creators. You can read all about Originals coming to YouTube Red here.

We’re working to bring YouTube Red and our YouTube Music, Gaming and Kids apps to more countries soon. And don’t worry! The free, ad-supported version of YouTube we all know and love isn’t going anywhere. You’ll still be able to enjoy YouTube, along with the YouTube Kids, Gaming and Music apps free of charge. But with YouTube Red, you’ll be able to support the people who make your favorite videos while watching what you want, when you want, on any device you want, uninterrupted.

Viewers in the U.S. can try YouTube Red for free with a one month trial on October 28 and YouTube Music will be coming soon.

 

Matt Leske, Senior Product Manager, recently watched "The Juice Challenge."

Source: YouTube Blog


Introducing YouTube Red Original Series and Movies from your favorite stars

Last year, we announced an initiative to invest in the creativity of our top YouTube stars. We wanted to give them an opportunity to realize some of their long-held creative ambitions by developing new content for YouTube. Today, we’re announcing some of the original series and movies we’ll be debuting with YouTube Red.

YouTube Red is the experience fans have been asking for. For just $9.99 a month, you’ll be able to enjoy videos across all of YouTube without ads, save videos to watch offline on your phone or tablet and play videos in the background.

But we’re not stopping there. Starting next year, YouTube Red members will get access to new, original series and movies from some of YouTube’s biggest creators. We’re excited to announce some of them today, with more to come:


  • Scare PewDiePie: In this reality-adventure series from the creator and executive producers of The Walking Dead at Skybound Entertainment and Maker Studios, experience thrills, chills and laughter as PewDiePie encounters terrifying situations inspired by his favorite video games.
  • Sing It!: From Fine Brothers Entertainment and Mandeville Films comes SING IT!, a scripted comedy that lovingly satirizes the reality singing competitions that have become a centerpiece of pop culture.
  • Lazer Team: In this feature-length action-comedy from Rooster Teeth and Fullscreen Films, four small-town losers stumble upon an alien ship carrying a mysterious cargo, leading to a battle to save Earth from an all-powerful enemy.
  • A Trip to Unicorn Island: From the team at Astronauts Wanted, this feature-length movie gives fans an extraordinary look inside the life and journey of Lilly Singh as she embarks on a challenging 26-city global tour where she has to remember to practice what she preaches: happiness is the only thing worth fighting for.
  • Untitled Joey Graceffa project: In this all-new reality adventure series, Joey Graceffa brings together an ensemble of top YouTubers for a murder mystery they'll never forget. They'll form alliances to survive, but little do they know that most won't make it out alive.
  • 360 Project from MatPat of Game Theory: YouTube educator and pop culture expert MatPat from The Game Theorists invites the audience to come along for the ride in an innovative new series and 360 VR experience. In each episode Matt explores the real-life science behind popular video games by throwing gamers into the high-stakes scenarios they play through every day, from water jetpacks to haunted pizzerias.
  • Single by 30: In this romantic drama series from Wong Fu Productions and New Form Digital, two high school best friends make a promise to get married if they’re still single at 30. A decade later, with 30 quickly approaching, their attempt at upholding their vow unfolds in unexpected ways. Starring Harry Shum, Jr. and Kina Grannis.
  • Untitled CollegeHumor project: Written by and starring the cast of CollegeHumor, along with special guests, this new anthology series will take a dark and comedic look at the absurdity of Internet culture.
  • Fight of the Living Dead: In an unprecedented social experiment reality show from Alpine Labs, Fight of the Living Dead takes popular YouTube talent and traps them in a frighteningly realistic zombie apocalypse. They must use their instincts and gaming skills to survive as they battle the elements for the ultimate prize of survival.
  • I Am Tobuscus: From the mind of Toby Turner, this scripted comedy explores the world of a self-involved YouTube creator pursuing bigger stardom. The show features original music, and satirizes the hilarious details of being an eccentric, new-age celebrity.


We’re excited to bring these original series and movies to YouTube Red members and give you even more for your membership beginning next year. Viewers in the U.S. can try YouTube Red for free with a one month trial starting on October 28.

Susanne Daniels, VP, Global Head of Original Programming, recently watched "If Google Was A Guy (Part 4)."

Source: YouTube Blog


Gamers and streamers – a winner is you!

It’s you who makes YouTube the most watched platform for gamers—far and away. Every month gamers watch more than 144 billion minutes of gaming videos and live streams on YouTube. To put it into perspective, that’s like watching Let’s Plays for more than 270,000 years straight 24 hours a day—or beating Final Fantasy VII 1,900,000 times a day!

Today’s updates to YouTube Gaming are the next step in our quest to create the best place for gamers to come together to watch gaming videos, build communities, and live stream. We’ve listened to your feedback since September and have been working on some of the most requested new features and improvements.

Mobile Capture: Empowering streams of every shape and size
Every day, games are played while waiting for the bus, riding the subway, or lounging on the couch—but what about live streaming your mobile gameplay? You heard it from us at the Tokyo Game Show and now it’s here to stay. You can now record and live stream mobile gameplay on-the-go directly from Android devices using Mobile Capture on YouTube Gaming. You don’t need any additional hardware or software—just tap Go Live (or your avatar on a phone) in the YouTube Gaming app, turn on your selfie cam and record your commentary with your phone’s microphone.



Narrate and react to your gameplay using the phone’s microphone and a selfie-cam overlay. Entertain and interact with your audience via live chat. Go live and capture all Android games today! 

Sponsorships: Making it easy to back your favorite gamers
Support the live streams and videos you love with Fan Funding and Sponsorships, now in beta to a small group of creators. For a monthly payment, sponsors receive extra perks including a live chat badge chosen by the creator and access to exclusive chat sessions. We’ll continuously expand the list of beta channels, so keep your eyes peeled!



Other new and improved features
Here are some of the other requested changes we’ve made to date. Thanks for the feedback and keep it coming!

  • More easily see when there are live streams for games in your collection
  • Easier video bookmarking with Watch Later
  • Improved performance and a redesigned watch page on gaming.youtube.com
  • Better search navigation on iOS by remembering your previous searches
  • Import existing subscriptions anytime from YouTube via Settings

Go live today with the newly updated YouTube Gaming app available on Google Play and the App Store, for U.S. and U.K.

Barbara Macdonald, Product Manager, recently live streamed "Bad Piggies."

Source: YouTube Blog


YouTube goes (even more) global!

If you’re watching a YouTube video today, chances are you’re not in the United States. More than 80 percent of YouTube’s billions of views each day come from fans in countries outside the U.S., and the videos and creators they’re watching are just as global.

We want to make sure the videos you see when you fire up YouTube are relevant to you, wherever you’re watching. That’s why we’re launching even more local country versions of YouTube, connecting fans with creators in their home countries and giving those creators a way to earn money from their popularity. With the addition of the Adriatics, Baltics, Bulgaria, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Belarus, YouTube now has local versions in 85 countries.

For fans in these countries, this means easily discovering local creators and content. In Kazakhstan, you’ll find local talent such as DynastyofCat, a hugely popular DIY and vlogging channel, or even local broadcasters like TheSevenChannel, right there on the homepage. In Belarus, you can find 17-year-old vlogger DimaErmuzevich who regularly reaches more than 400K fans; and the Serbian music channel Grand Production, which has grown a following throughout the Balkans and beyond with their folk music.

Local versions of YouTube are good news for creators, too. It opens up the opportunity for creators to become a partner, earn money from their channels, and gain access to tools and resources that can help them make the most of YouTube. Creators can access online lessons via the YouTube Creator Academy to get started and learn best practices, and the Creator Community gives creators a place to meet each other, find collaborations, and more. We hope that this will allow more creators to bring more of their ideas and talents to YouTube for all of us to enjoy.

So whether you’re viewing us from youtube.by, youtube.kz, or youtube.bg, you’ve now got your own YouTube that not only connects you with a community of a billion people, but helps you see the creativity going on right in your backyard.

Marenco Kemp, Head of EMEA Online Partnerships, recently watched "Top10Memes: Top 10 Facts - Lego."

Source: YouTube Blog


Improving YouTube video thumbnails with deep neural nets

Video thumbnails are often the first things viewers see when they look for something interesting to watch. A strong, vibrant, and relevant thumbnail draws attention, giving viewers a quick preview of the content of the video, and helps them to find content more easily. Better thumbnails lead to more clicks and views for video creators.

Inspired by the recent remarkable advances of deep neural networks (DNNs) in computer vision, such as image and video classification, our team has recently launched an improved automatic YouTube "thumbnailer" in order to help creators showcase their video content. Here is how it works.

The Thumbnailer Pipeline
While a video is being uploaded to YouTube, we first sample frames from the video at one frame per second. Each sampled frame is evaluated by a quality model and assigned a single quality score. The frames with the highest scores are selected, enhanced and rendered as thumbnails with different sizes and aspect ratios. Among all the components, the quality model is the most critical and turned out to be the most challenging to develop. In the latest version of the thumbnailer algorithm, we used a DNN for the quality model. So, what is the quality model measuring, and how is the score calculated?

The main processing pipeline of the thumbnailer.

(Training) The Quality Model
Unlike the task of identifying if a video contains your favorite animal, judging the visual quality of a video frame can be very subjective - people often have very different opinions and preferences when selecting frames as video thumbnails. One of the main challenges we faced was how to collect a large set of well-annotated training examples to feed into our neural network. Fortunately, on YouTube, in addition to having algorithmically generated thumbnails, many YouTube videos also come with carefully designed custom thumbnails uploaded by creators. Those thumbnails are typically well framed, in-focus, and center on a specific subject (e.g. the main character in the video). We consider these custom thumbnails from popular videos as positive (high-quality) examples, and randomly selected video frames as negative (low-quality) examples. Some examples of the training images are shown below.

Example training images.
The visual quality model essentially solves a problem we call "binary classification": given a frame, is it of high quality or not? We trained a DNN on this set using a similar architecture to the Inception network in GoogLeNet that achieved the top performance in the ImageNet 2014 competition.

Results
Compared to the previous automatically generated thumbnails, the DNN-powered model is able to select frames with much better quality. In a human evaluation, the thumbnails produced by our new models are preferred to those from the previous thumbnailer in more than 65% of side-by-side ratings. Here are some examples of how the new quality model performs on YouTube videos:

Example frames with low and high quality score from the DNN quality model, from video “Grand Canyon Rock Squirrel”.
Thumbnails generated by old vs. new thumbnailer algorithm.

We recently launched this new thumbnailer across YouTube, which means creators can start to choose from higher quality thumbnails generated by our new thumbnailer. Next time you see an awesome YouTube thumbnail, don’t hesitate to give it a thumbs up. ;)

Weilong Yang, software engineer, recently watched “Contact Juggling - His Skills are Totally Hypnotizing”
Min-hsuan Tsai, software engineer, recently watched ”People Are Awesome 2015”
Thanks to the Video Content Analysis and YouTube Creator teams