November 2, 2008

YouTube's New Features Since the Acquisition

Today YouTube got Google's autotranslate for caption tracks.

I've been planning for a while to do a post on all the new features YouTube has been getting, but as always, I'm very busy. Still, since YouTube got a new feature today, why not write about it?

  • You can now use autotranslate caption tracks in YouTube videos to another language. This makes watching videos from foreign countries much easier, assuming Google Translate is perfect (it isn't, and I expect hilariously wrong video translations coming to a future near you; still the feature will be of great use).
  • You can deep link YouTube videos (announcement October 30th) by appending #t=XmXXs to the end of a URL.
  • Comments on videos mentioning times will link to that time in the video that they commented on.
  • Comments can be spoken aloud before you post, reminiscent of XKCD.
  • Captions, Subtitles and Annotations can be added to videos.
  • Higher quality versions of videos can be added/used.
  • Limit on video size is 1GB (from 100MB) and batch uploading has been added, allowing ten videos to be uploaded at a time.

Note that all of these have been added after YouTube became GooTube (I didn't add any back end features like piracy filtering that Google has been improving since neither the end user nor the video publisher really deals with these often in my experience).

In my opinion, all these features have been really evolutionary, which, as you know, is a good thing despite the popular opinion.

Any ideas on what other features YouTube should get? Or maybe notes on ones I missed?

1 comments:

Steve Ballmer said...

Still loving your blog!