You can use YouTube in many ways, but since it's a video-sharing
network, two obvious ones are to watch other people's videos and to
upload your own videos so other folks can watch them.
The site's
motto is "Broadcast Yourself," but you don't have to, of course. You can
simply watch other people broadcasting themselves. Or you can broadcast
anything else you want besides yourself--your pet Fido's escapades,
your baby's wobbly first steps, random scenes from your life and of
course, current news or comical scenes that you may witness.
Use YouTube Anonymously to Watch Video
Unlike
any other social networks, YouTube doesn't require you to create an
account before you can search for content or view videos. Searching and
watching are two activities you can engage in anonymously on the site.
But
if you want to broadcast yourself or anything else, you'll have to
register for a Google account and get a user name and password, because
you can't upload videos without a user ID.
Get an Account to Broadcast Yourself
Google, which bought
YouTube in 2006 and now operates it as a subsidiary, abolished
standalone YouTube accounts a few years later. Today it lets people use
any existing Google ID to sign into YouTube so they can create custom
channels and do all the things allowed with a YouTube account. If you
don't have a Google ID or don't want to link it to YouTube, you can
create a new (joint) YouTube and Google account, which basically means
creating a new Google ID.
Use YouTube for Basic Activities
Signing into YouTube as a registered user lets you do a lot of stuff you can't do while browsing the site anonymously, such as:
- Save favorite videos for quicker viewing later
- Comment on videos you watch or have an opinion about
- Rate video's you've watched
- Create playlists of videos to watch
- Operate your own video channel
- Upload videos for others to watch
Browse and Watch Videos on YouTube
Watching
videos is straightforward--just click the play button and the video
will start streaming to your computer or mobile phone. By default, the
video appears in a box on your screen, but you can make the video fill
your screen by clicking on the full screen icon.
You can browse
categories by topic, run keyword searches, or scroll through the most
popular or trending videos to find footage to watch.
The video search has filters you can apply, too, in case you want to look for videos by date or popularity level.
There is also a YouTube Charts page showing popular videos. And there are lots of blogs about trends on YouTube.
YouTube's Massive Scale
The
amount of content available on YouTube is truly amazing. YouTube is
available in more than 60 languages and most countries worldwide, so its
content is diverse.
As of mid-2012, YouTube said it was receiving
more than 800 million unique visitors monthly. Collectively they were
watching more than 3 billion hours of footage each month. And every
minute, 72 hours of video get uploaded to the site.
Upload Videos and Share them With Friends & Strangers
The
whole idea behind YouTube (created by former PayPal employees) when it
started in 2005 was to simplify the messy process of sharing videos,
which has long been complicated by the many different codecs used by
various cameras and online video sites.
These video formatting
issues can still be tricky, but YouTube has taken much of the pain out
of putting videos online. Many smart phone cameras and point-and-shoot
cameras store video now in formats taken compatible with YouTube (though
not all of them do.) It's easier to use YouTube, of course, if your
camera stores the video in a compatible format.
Thankfully, YouTube accepts most popular video formats.
Length and size limits:
Size limits on your video files are 2 GB per file. Also, YouTube limits
the length of many published videos to 15 minutes, but you can seek and
obtain permission to upload longer ones. One way of doing it requires
putting a mobile phone number on your account, and maintaining your
account in good standing with no reported violations of YouTube's rules.
Manage Each Video with Individual Settings
For
each video, you can also set privacy levels (i.e., decide who can view
it); decide whether you want people to be able to rate the video (using
YouTube's star system) and leave comments for others to see; and set
licensing rules for how others can use your material.
YouTube offers
online video editing tools, but they are fairly crude, and many people
prefer to do any significant editing offline before uploading the final
footage to YouTube.
You can annotate your videos, too, by adding
comments as a note at certain points in the footage, or through a speech
bubble that will be superimposed on the vide image, like text bubbles
in comics.
Finally, you can share each video in multiple ways--by
sending out a URL as a link in email, for example, or by grabbing the
embed code YouTube generates for each video and pasting that code in
another website.
Your Own Video Channel
All your uploaded
videos are grouped together into your own video channel. You can set the
privacy level determining whether the public can watch them or only
authorized friends.
You can make your custom YouTube video channel
look spiffy by uploading your own logo or other image. Each video you
upload also can be customized in terms of how the controls look. And of
course you can add titles and descriptions to help people decide if they
want to watch your individual video clips.
