Author Archives: John G. Doe

A YouTube built for gamers

As a kid, I spent hours on the living room couch playing video games with friends, taking turns trying to beat Ganon in "Ocarina of Time" and trading Pokémon until I had all 151. Soon controller passing and Game Boy link cables gave way to network multiplayer and PC LAN parties. Eventually, my living room became a virtual one, with a network of gamers sharing experiences and discoveries. 

Today, the gaming world is much more diverse than the one I grew up with, and the community has created new formats that have made gaming more collaborative and interactive. On YouTube, gaming has spawned entirely new genres of videos, from let’s plays, walkthroughs, and speedruns to cooking and music videos. Now, it’s our turn to return the favor with something built just for gamers.

This summer, we'll launch YouTube Gaming, a brand new app and website to keep you connected to the games, players, and culture that matter to you, with videos, live streams, and the biggest community of gamers on the web—all in one place.



YouTube Gaming is built to be all about your 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 title. You’ll also find channels from a wide array of game publishers and YouTube creators.

Keeping up with these games and channels is now super easy, too. Add a game to your collection for quick access whenever you want to check up on the latest videos. Subscribe to a channel, and you'll get a notification as soon as they start a live stream. Uncover new favorites with recommendations based on the games and channels you love. And when you want something specific, you can search with confidence, knowing that typing “call” will show you “Call of Duty” and not “Call Me Maybe.” 



Live streams bring the gaming community closer together, so we’ve put them front-and-center on the YouTube Gaming homepage. And in the coming weeks, we’ll launch an improved live experience that makes it simpler to broadcast your gameplay to YouTube. On top of existing features like high frame rate streaming at 60fps, DVR, and automatically converting your stream into a YouTube video, we’re redesigning our system so that you no longer need to schedule a live event ahead of time. We’re also creating single link you can share for all your streams.

YouTube Gaming will be available this summer, starting in the U.S. and U.K. We’re building this just for gamers—so we want to hear from you about how we can make it the best way to connect with your community. If you’re at E3 next week, come by our booth for an early look at everything we’ve been working on. If not, tune in live from home at youtube.com/e3, head over to gaming.youtube.com and follow us @YouTubeGaming and you’ll be the first to know when YouTube Gaming is ready for you to play with.

Alan Joyce, Product Manager, recently played "Final Fantasy XIV"

Source: YouTube Blog


Get your game on with YouTube during E3

We’re now only two weeks away from the start of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles, and you can get a front-row seat to the action with YouTube! We're inviting your favorite YouTube creators to show us what's cool and coming up next in the world of gaming, so you can experience every jaw-dropping demo and announcement LIVE.

We are building out a dedicated E3 YouTube hub where you will be able to follow all the live streams and trailers from the event, starting on Sunday, June 14, with the Nintendo World Championships, followed by the Bethesda press conference and the unveiling of the latest installment in the "Doom" series.

On Monday, June 15, at 9 a.m. PT, the wall-to-wall coverage will continue with a 12-hour live stream marathon, hosted by Geoff Keighley, brought to you by the movie “Self/less” - in theaters July 10. Geoff and YouTube gaming creators will bring you live coverage of press conferences from publishers like Xbox, Sony, EA and Ubisoft.


The program will include live “Let’s plays” of new titles, plus celebrity interviews along with other video game stars from the YouTube family. You'll also get live coverage from IGN and GameSpot, just like last year.

The play-by-play coverage will continue with hundreds of hours of live and on-demand content throughout the week directly from YouTube’s booth at E3, hosted by RoosterTeeth, along with our legendary Trailer Battle, Nintendo’s Digital Event and Treehouse Live, as well as other exclusive gaming content.

From live reactions and gaming demos, to trivia showdowns and “Meet the Makers” sessions with industry experts, the E3 YouTube hub will offer you the easiest place to explore the best of E3. Stay tuned starting on June 14.

Ryan Wyatt, global head of gaming content, recently watched "E3 Live on YouTube 2015 announcement video."

Source: YouTube Blog


YouTube A to Z #HappyBirthdayYouTube

Every adventure starts somewhere, and YouTube’s began on Saturday, April 23, 2005, when "Me at the Zoo" became the first video uploaded to a new site no one had ever heard of. Captured at California's San Diego Zoo, the clip is a 19-second description of what exactly makes elephants so cool. Its brief runtime and casual setup suggest little of the online video craziness that would follow over the subsequent decade.

“Me at the Zoo” proved to be a simple distillation of the premise of a new platform, where anyone could just turn on a camera and broadcast themselves with ease. Who could have predicted that, in that same environment, new genres, new forms of expression, and new paths to stardom would evolve? That engaging and unique personalities borne of this place could be more influential than Hollywood's biggest names? Or that more than a billion people from all corners of the globe would come together in that space to experience what the world creates, broadcasts, and shares?

Yeah. We were surprised, too.

For our 10th birthday this month, we've gone from A to Z celebrating the adorable, empowering, awesome, weird and wonderful moments that represent the many sides of YouTube. But, of course, if we're really going to capture 10 years of YouTube, we're going to need to do it in … a video:



Thanks for a wild and inspiring 10 years. Now, you've got 300 hours of video to capture and share in the next minute. So get back to it!

**Bonus Points: How well do you know YouTube, A to Z? Play the YouTube trivia game to find out at YouTube.com/10

YT-10-infograph2705b.jpg

Source: YouTube Blog


Ten years of YouTube video tech in ten videos

2005: YouTube is born

Me at the Zoo is the first video uploaded to YouTube

2006: Google buys YouTube

One year after YouTube launches, videos play in the FLV container with the H.263 codec at a maximum resolution of 240p. We scale videos up to 640x360, but you can still click a button to play at original size.

2007: YouTube goes mobile

YouTube is one of the original applications on the iPhone. Because it doesn't support Flash, we re-encode every single YouTube video into H.264 with the MP4 container. YouTube videos get a resolution notch to 360p.

2008: YouTube kicks it up to HD

With upload sizes and download speeds growing, videos jump in size up to 720p HD. Lower resolution files get higher quality by squeezing Main Profile H.264 into FLVs.

2009: YouTube enters the third dimension

YouTube supports 3D videos, 1080p and live streaming.

2010: YouTube's on TV

The biggest screen in your house now gets YouTube courtesy of Flash Lite and ActionScript 2. 2010 also sees the first playbacks with HTML5 <video> thanks to VP8, an open source video codec. We bump up the maximum resolution to 4K, known as "Original" at the time.

2011: YouTube slices bread (and videos) to battle buffering

We launch Sliced Bread, codename for a project that enables adaptive bitrate in the Flash player by requesting videos a little piece at a time. Users see higher quality videos more often and buffering less often.

2012: YouTube live streaming hits prime time

We scale up our live streaming infrastructure to support the 2012 Summer Olympics, with over 1,200 events. In October, over 8 million people watch live as Felix Baumgartner jumps from the stratosphere.

2013: YouTube's first taste of VP9

We start our first experiments with VP9 in Chrome, which brings higher quality video at less bandwidth. Adaptive bitrate streaming in the HTML5 and Flash players moves to the DASH standard using both FMP4 and MKV video containers.

2014: Silky smooth 60fps comes to YouTube

High frame rate isn't just for games anymore: YouTube now supports videos that play in up to 60fps. Gangnam Style becomes the first YouTube video to break the MAX_INT barrier with more than 232 / 2 - 1 views.

2015: YouTube adds spherical video (look behind you!)

You can now upload videos that wrap 360 degrees around the viewer. Even 4K videos can play up to 60fps. HTML5 becomes the default YouTube web player.

Richard Leider, Engineering Manager, recently watched David Bowie - Oh You Pretty Things
Jonathan Levine, Product Manager, recently watched Candide Thovex - One of those days 2

Celebrating 10 Years of YouTube

Cross-posted from the YouTube Trends Blog

On April 23, 2005, history was made. An 18-second clip about how cool elephants are was shot at the San Diego Zoo and uploaded to a then-private video sharing site called YouTube.

That May, YouTube launched in beta before becoming available to the wider public six months later. Ten years have now passed, and that site has grown to become not just the biggest video platform on the web—a community of more than one billion people, where hundreds of millions of hours of video are watched and billions of views are generated every day —but one of the largest and most diverse collections of self-expression in history.

YouTube is a portrait of our global culture, seen through the lenses and perspectives of people around the world. It is a portrait built by a creative community of bold and fearless individuals. Built by comedians, gamers, activists, artists, performers, teachers, and pranksters. Built with cats and rainbows and blenders and ninjas and unicorns. It was built on the silly. It was built on the profound. It was built by you.

And 10 years in, you continue to redefine how the world experiences music, entertainment, and news. How the world laughs and how the world learns. How we shape political events and how we connect over the things we love.

You’ve helped turn creators into the biggest names in entertainment. You’ve given people opportunities to share their voice and talent no matter where they are from or what their age or point of view. You built a world where little ideas can bring about amazing things and where amazing things can bring little delights to each of us.

So in honor of our 10th birthday, we’re celebrating you, our YouTube community. Every day over the next 26 days, we’ll take a look back at some of the most memorable moments, from the silly to the profound, that you’ve shared on YouTube in the last 10 years. It’s YouTube from A to Z. Literally.

You can follow our celebration throughout the month of May on our YouTube Trends blog.

Source: YouTube Blog


New original content from top YouTube creators

At YouTube, we have a core belief: we only succeed if our creators do.

After launching the Creator Hub to help creators get the most out of YouTube from anywhere in the world and opening YouTube Spaces in the U.S., the U.K., Japan and Brazil, we decided to take an even bolder step to invest in ambitious projects from our top creators. Today, we’re announcing partnerships with four top creators to help bring their next big original series to life on YouTube:

  • Since launching their first YouTube channel in 2007, the Fine Brothers’ channels have amassed over 17 million subscribers and over 3 billion views as well as earning a Daytime Emmy. They’ll continue the hot streak with their new scripted comedy series that takes a satirical look at the world of singing competition shows, produced in partnership with Mandeville Films.
  • For six years, Prank vs. Prank have waged an epic prank war on each other in front of an audience of nearly 14 million subscribers and generated nearly 3 billion views on their two channels. In their forthcoming series, celebrity guests join Jesse and Jeana to pull off their most ambitious pranks yet. 
  • Joey Graceffa has built a devoted fan following of over 5 million subscribers, cumed over 600 million views and earned two Teen Choice nominations through his channels’ daily vlogs, scripted series and short films. Now Joey will lead an all-star cast of YouTubers in his all-new murder mystery reality series.
  • For a decade, Smosh has entertained a YouTube fanbase of over 35 million subscribers across their channels with comedy sketches that have generated over 7 billion views. In their new comedy series, we’ll see Ian and Anthony working at a theme restaurant where out-of-control kids and crazy parents are all in a day’s work.

We’re also excited to announce a new collaboration between YouTube and AwesomenessTV. Together, we’ll release several feature length films over the next two years, all driven by YouTube stars and developed and produced by AwesomenessTV’s Brian Robbins. The films will all premiere globally on YouTube before they become available elsewhere, setting what we believe will become a new distribution paradigm for years to come. We hope to release our first film this fall, with more details to come soon.

We hope that these new series and feature films, as well as those that follow, give top creators a new way to showcase their talent to fans on YouTube.

Alex Carloss, Head of YouTube Originals recently watched “Me at the zoo.”

Source: YouTube Blog


Watch the Global Citizen 2015 Earth Day event—live on YouTube on April 18

No matter where you are this Saturday, you can have a front row seat at the Global Citizen 2015 Earth Day event. Tune in to the event live on the Global Citizen YouTube channel to catch performances by No Doubt, Usher, Fall Out Boy, Mary J. Blige, Train, and My Morning Jacket, with special guests Common and D’Banj.

To bring you the latest from the National Mall in D.C., YouTube stars Matthew Santoro (MatthewSantoro) and Yousef Erakat (FouseyTube) will join the Global Citizen hosts, which include UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, U.S. Senator Chris Coons, will.i.am, Soledad O’Brien, Chris Martin, Freida Pinto, and more.


Celebrate the 45th anniversary of Earth Day by joining the largest movement of people taking action to end extreme poverty and stop climate change. It all begins at 11:45 a.m. ET on April 18 on the Global Citizen YouTube channel.

Lindsay Dahms, Brand Marketing Manager, recently watched "Fall Out Boy - Irresistible (Official)."

Source: YouTube Blog


VP9: Faster, better, buffer-free YouTube videos

As more people watch more high-quality videos across more screens, we need video formats that provide better resolution without increasing bandwidth usage. That’s why we started encoding YouTube videos in VP9, the open-source codec that brings HD and even 4K (2160p) quality at half the bandwidth used by other known codecs.

VP9 is the most efficient video compression codec in widespread use today. In the last year alone, YouTube users have already watched more than 25 billion hours of VP9 video, billions of which would not have been played in HD without VP9's bandwidth benefits. And with more of our device partners adopting VP9, we wanted to give you a primer on the technology.

How VP9 works

Videos hold a lot of information. If video were stored in the same format that a camera sensor uses when shooting a scene, the resulting files would be enormous — raw 4K is up to 18,000 Mbps! Instead, modern video compression looks at a video more like a person might, by encoding a description of the features in a scene, and tracking how those features move and change. This compression is hundreds of times more efficient than a camera sensor's recording and is what makes video streaming possible.

While VP9 uses the same basic blueprint as previous codecs, the WebM team has packed improvements into VP9 to get more quality out of each byte of video. For instance, the encoder prioritizes the sharpest image features, and the codec now uses asymmetric transforms to help keep even the most challenging scenes looking crisp and block-free.

Here's a comparison between the image quality you'd get watching Janelle Monaé with VP9 or legacy H.264 transcodes on a 600Kbps connection:

View: VP9H.264Combined

Bringing quality to the people

This new format bumps everybody one notch closer to our goal of instant, high-quality, buffer-free videos. That means that if your Internet connection used to only play up to 480p without buffering on YouTube, it can now play silky smooth 720p with VP9.

VP9 also has benefits for people with limited bandwidth or expensive data plans. By cutting bitrates in as much as half, it dramatically increases the set of users that can watch 360p quality video without increased rebuffering or cost.

Reduced time spent watching low quality formats thanks to VP9

Opening the door to 4K

And for those who can never get enough pixels (including your humble author!), VP9 unlocks the burgeoning world of 4K videos. At larger video sizes, VP9 actually gets even more efficient than its predecessors, so uninterrupted 4K content can now be streamed by a significant and growing part of the YouTube audience. The amount of 4K video uploaded to YouTube has more than tripled in the past year, and VP9 helps us plan for improved streaming into the future. You can find 4K videos by using the search filter, or see some of our favorites in this playlist.

Where can I use VP9?

Thanks to our device partners, VP9 decoding support is available today in the Chrome web browser, in Android devices like the Samsung Galaxy S6, and in TVs and game consoles from Sony, LG, Sharp, and more. More than 20 device partners across the industry are launching products in 2015 and beyond using VP9.

To learn more about producing your own VP9 content, see our FFMpeg encoding guide or check out the Adobe Premier WebM plugin.

Steven Robertson, Software Engineer, recently watched “St. Lucia - Before The Dive.”

Scaling MySQL in the cloud with Vitess and Kubernetes

[Cross-posted from the Google Cloud Platform Blog] 

Your new website is growing exponentially. After a few rounds of high fives, you start scaling to meet this unexpected demand. While you can always add more front-end servers, eventually your database becomes a bottleneck, which leads you to . . .

  • Add more replicas for better read throughput and data durability
  • Introduce sharding to scale your write throughput and let your data set grow beyond a single machine
  • Create separate replica pools for batch jobs and backups, to isolate them from live traffic
  • Clone the whole deployment into multiple datacenters worldwide for disaster recovery and lower latency

At YouTube, we went on that journey as we scaled our MySQL deployment, which today handles the metadata for billions of daily video views and 300 hours of new video uploads per minute. To do this, we developed the Vitess platform, which addresses scaling challenges while hiding the associated complexity from the application layer.

Vitess is available as an open-source project and runs best in a containerized environment. With Kubernetes and Google Container Engine as your container cluster manager, it's now a lot easier to get started. We’ve created a single deployment configuration for Vitess that works on any platform that Kubernetes supports.

In addition to being easy to deploy in a container cluster, Vitess also takes full advantage of the benefits offered by a container cluster manager, in particular:

  • Horizontal scaling – add capacity by launching additional nodes rather than making one huge node
  • Dynamic placement – let the cluster manager schedule Vitess containers wherever it wants
  • Declarative specification – describe your desired end state, and let the cluster manager create it
  • Self-healing components – recover automatically from machine failures

In this environment, Vitess provides a MySQL storage layer with improved durability, scalability, and manageability.

We're just getting started with this integration, but you can already run Vitess on Kubernetes yourself. For more on Vitess, check out vitess.io, ask questions on our forum, or join us on GitHub. In particular, take a look at our overview to understand the trade-offs of Vitess versus NoSQL solutions and fully-managed MySQL solutions like Google Cloud SQL.

-Posted by Anthony Yeh, Software Engineer, YouTube

YouTube now defaults to HTML5 <video>

Four years ago, we wrote about YouTube’s early support for the HTML5 <video> tag and how it performed compared to Flash. At the time, there were limitations that held it back from becoming our preferred platform for video delivery. Most critically, HTML5 lacked support for Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) that lets us show you more videos with less buffering.

Over the last four years, we’ve worked with browser vendors and the broader community to close those gaps, and now, YouTube uses HTML5 <video> by default in Chrome, IE 11, Safari 8 and in beta versions of Firefox.

The benefits of HTML5 extend beyond web browsers, and it's now also used in smart TVs and other streaming devices. Here are a few key technologies that have enabled this critical step forward: 

MediaSource Extensions
Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) streaming is critical for providing a quality video experience for viewers - allowing us to quickly and seamlessly adjust resolution and bitrate in the face of changing network conditions. ABR has reduced buffering by more than 50 percent globally and as much as 80 percent on heavily-congested networks. MediaSource Extensions also enable live streaming in game consoles like Xbox and PS4, on devices like Chromecast and in web browsers.

VP9 video codec
HTML5 lets you take advantage of the open VP9 codec, which gives you higher quality video resolution with an average bandwidth reduction of 35 percent. These smaller files allow more people to access 4K and HD at 60FPS -- and videos start 15-80 percent faster. We've already served hundreds of billions of VP9 videos, and you can look for more about VP9 in a future post.

Encrypted Media Extensions and Common Encryption
In the past, the choice of delivery platform (Flash, Silverlight, etc) and content protection technology (Access, PlayReady) were tightly linked, as content protection was deeply integrated into the delivery platform and even the file format. Encrypted Media Extensions separate the work of content protection from delivery, enabling content providers like YouTube to use a single HTML5 video player across a wide range of platforms. Combined with Common Encryption, we can support multiple content protection technologies on different platforms with a single set of assets, making YouTube play faster and smoother.

WebRTC
YouTube enables everyone to share their videos with the world, whether uploading pre-recorded videos or broadcasting live. WebRTC allows us to build on the same technology that enables plugin-free Google Hangouts to provide broadcasting tools from within the browser.

Fullscreen
Using the new fullscreen APIs in HTML5, YouTube is able to provide an immersive fullscreen viewing experience (perfect for those 4K videos), all with standard HTML UI.

Moving to <iframe> embeds
Given the progress we've made with HTML5 <video>, we’re now defaulting to the HTML5 player on the web. We're also deprecating the "old style" of Flash <object> embeds and our Flash API. We encourage all embedders to use the <iframe> API, which can intelligently use whichever technology the client supports.

These advancements have benefitted not just YouTube’s community, but the entire industry. Other content providers like Netflix and Vimeo, as well as companies like Microsoft and Apple have embraced HTML5 and been key contributors to its success. By providing an open standard platform, HTML5 has also enabled new classes of devices like Chromebooks and Chromecast. You can support HTML5 by using the <iframe> API everywhere you embed YouTube videos on the web. 

Richard Leider, Engineering Manager, recently watched, “Ex Hex - Waterfall.”