On December 11, the first of three virtual reality projects from YouTube and National Geographic will debut on the video platform. Called "The Okavango Experience," this VR series will take viewers through the Okavango Delta in Africa, following a NatGeo team across 1,500 miles over the course of four months. Each episode is designed to be short and easily consumed in VR.
If Wikipedia has become notorious for being the Internet’s information rabbit hole, YouTube is its video counterpart. Thanks to Google’s famous algorithms, your YouTube app’s home page can be filled with a nearly endless list of suggestions based on your search and viewing history. Not all of them, however, end up being what their cover images make them out to be. Fortunately, YouTube is taking the guesswork out of the equation by bringing its Autoplay on Home feature to both Android and iOS and for all user tiers.
Ariana Grande broke YouTube today, in a manner of speaking. The pop singer's anticipated "thank u, next" music video went live on the video destination today, resulting in a mass of viewers that overloaded the platform. YouTube revealed in a tweet that it was unable to handle the huge influx of comments, resulting in a posting delay.
Around this time last year, YouTube introduced its own Instagram-like Stories, a new feature that enables users to share short mobile-only videos. The Stories feature was introduced in beta and only made available to select users at the time, but now YouTube is expanding it to all creators who have at least 10,000 subscribers.
Nintendo may have finally picked up the slack and have become one of the most beloved console makers again but in some areas it still has pretty archaic business policies and philosophies. One shining example is its Creators Program which seemed to have been created in the age before the Internet. Fortunately, Nintendo has finally gotten some sense and is retiring the program, giving video streamers and uploaders a bit more freedom, including in how they monetize their content.
YouTube has been in the original programming game for a few years at this point, but now, facing stiff competition from companies like Netflix and Amazon, it might be looking to shake some things up. A new report today claims that YouTube may step away from its strategy of using original content to drive subscriptions to YouTube Premium, potentially making those shows available to free viewers in one form or another.
YouTube has added YouTube Music and YouTube Premium plans targeted at college students. Eligible students receive a discount on subscriptions, offering them an ad-free experience with the plans' extra features and lower rates. The new option better enables the service to compete with the likes of Spotify and other competitors that already offer student discounts.
For a decade now, YouTube creators have been overlaying annotations in their videos for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it's to note a correction, and other times it's to link to a supplementary or new video. For end users, annotations can often be annoying pop-ups that get in the way of videos, but the good news is that viewers won't have to contend with them much longer.
YouTube is starting to stream movies for free. No, we don’t mean those “low-production” indie movies or, worse, unauthorized copies of copyrighted films. We’re talking about older, but not too old, classics like “Terminator” and “Rocky”. The video on demand giant has silently been flipping the switch for dozens of its full-length videos in its YouTube Movies catalog. But like with anything on the Internet, you pay the price of free by being interrupted and watching ads.
Back in September at its fifth Oculus Connect conference, the company that started the VR renaissance announced that YouTube VR, Google’s premiere hub for 360, and 180, degree videos, would be coming to the new, independent VR headset and platform. It seems, however, that after the hype and frenzy died down, either Google or Oculus or both forgot to make good their promise. Because it’s only now, almost two months later, that YouTube VR has finally landed on the Oculus Go.
It's been a long time coming, but there's finally an official YouTube app available for the Nintendo Switch. Switch owners have been asking for a variety of streaming apps since the console released back in March 2017, and YouTube is unquestionably one of the most requested. Does this mean that more streaming apps are on their way?
The Nintendo Switch is a great portable gaming handheld that’s made even greater by the assortment of games that come raining down on it. All that’s really missing, at least for some owners, is the ability to turn the device into a great portable media player like the Nintendo DS system. That may still be a long time coming but Nintendo might be taking baby steps forward with the expected arrival of a YouTube app on the Switch in the next few days. At least based on one leak.