New tools for YouTube Creators

New features aplenty are on their way for video creators using YouTube. The company took to the stage at VidCon, and to its blog, to announce some fairly substantial updates. Specifically:

1. A brand new App – for Android only at the moment though an iOS version is coming “in the next week or two”, we’re told. Creator Studio will enable much more control for video makers than the existing playback-only App thank goodness. You’ll be able to “manage” your videos (exact functionality remains unspecified) as well as view your Analytics – watch those dollars pile up – and “more” (again, unspecified by YouTube. Sigh). They’ve changed the way the web-based interface works as well, apparently to match the new app. We think this is a good thing.
2. More music soundtracks in the free music library but now also an array of free-to-use sound effects as well. Could be handy.
3. Higher frame-rate video. Many people now shoot in 50p and 60p but YouTube only plays back at up to 30p. They say support for 48p and 60p is coming soon – alas no mention at all of whether 50p for the millions of people in PAL countries will be supported. Damn you Americans and your “Rest of the world? What rest of the world?” bias :-(
4. Fan funding. Rather like the tip jar on Vimeo, YouTube wants to let you put a “donate” button next to your videos so that if someone appreciates your work then can send you a fiscal tip for your efforts. Sounds good to us. This feature isn’t live yet but is being tested by a handful of channels.
5. Creator Credits. This is an interesting one, it’s going to be a way of tagging people you’ve collaborated with so that viewers can click on the tag to go to your collaborator. More interestingly, it’s a way for you to search for potential collaborators by their type of broadcast and even location. We think location-based search will throw up all kinds of intriguing possibilities.
6. Fan subtitles. This one, we can see, could throw up all kinds of hilarious and maybe even libellous possibilities. Google is suggesting that fans around the world should be able to contribute subtitle translations based on the captions you’ve created. Not sure that everyone will take this role seriously, so if you enable this it could be worth running the translations you receive through Google Translate back into your native language to check them!
7. Info cards. A sort of souped-up version of the rather basic annotations that we all know (and love? Maybe not) at present.
8. Even more ways to organise your videos into playlists. YouTube are obsessed with playlists. We don’t know why. We’d rather watch individual videos of our choosing, frankly.

Crikey. They have been busy. Much of this is good stuff – the App especially long overdue. We’ll keep judgement reserved about frame rates until we discover if we 50p’ers been remembered.

Any comments? Use the form below, we’d love to know what you think…