Australia Blog
News and rising stars from YouTube Australia
Australia's most watched YouTube videos of 2009
Thursday, 17 December 2009
Today we announced our first official YouTube most watched lists, a look at 2009 through the videos Australians and people around the world were watching and searching for.
From a singer's debut on the world stage, to newly-weds dancing down the aisle, YouTube has offered people a way to share together in both the big and small moments that touched millions of people around the world this year.
And in addition to global content, some great Aussie-generated content attracted hundreds of thousands of views.
Enjoy!
Most watched YouTube videos in Australia
Top five most watched YouTube videos overall:
Susan Boyle - Singer - Britains Got Talent 2009 (With Lyrics)
I'm On A Boat (ft. T-Pain) - Album Version
Miley Cyrus - The Climb - Official Music Video (HQ)
Miley Cyrus - Party In The U.S.A. - Official Music Video (HD)
Black Eyed Peas "Boom Boom Pow"
Top five most watched Australian-made videos:
Kate Miller-Heidke 'The Last Day On Earth' Official Video
Guy Sebastian - Like it Like That [Official Video]
Jessica Mauboy - Been Waiting [Official Video]
Cassie Davis - Like It Loud [Official Video]
Short Stack - Princess
Top five most watched music videos:
I'm On A Boat (ft. T-Pain) - Album Version
Miley Cyrus - The Climb - Official Music Video (HQ)
Miley Cyrus - Party In The U.S.A. - Official Music Video (HD)
Black Eyed Peas - Boom Boom Pow
Pussycat Dolls - Jai Ho
Top five most watched animal-related videos:
Extreme Sheep LED Art
Bizkit the Sleep Walking Dog
The largest dead snake ever found, over 50 feet.
Piranha Devours a Duck
Slow loris loves getting tickled
Instant celebrities thanks to YouTube:
Susan Boyle - Singer - Britains Got Talent 2009 (With Lyrics)
JK Wedding Entrance Dance
David After Dentist
Greatest freak out ever (ORIGINAL VIDEO)
Inspired Bicycles - Danny MacAskill April 2009
Top five most watched movie trailers:
New Moon Movie Trailer - Official (HD)
Bruno - Official Trailer
Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen Official HD Movie Trailer #2 NEW!
'2012' Trailer HD
Paranormal Activity - Official Trailer [HQ HD]
Top five most watched Australian user-generated content:
My Crazy Sister - mychonny
Asian and White Parents - mychonny
Sorry it's been a while - communitychannel
My Victorian Bushfire Campaign - juanmann
Uncomfortable Love Scene - communitychannel
Most watched YouTube videos globally
Susan Boyle - Britain's Got Talent (120+ million views)
David After Dentist (36+ million views)
JK Wedding Entrance Dance (33+ million views)
New Moon Movie Trailer (30+ million views)
Evian Roller Babies (27+ million views)
Posted by Kate Vale, Head of YouTube, Australia and New Zealand
Live on YouTube: Leaders Answer Your Questions in the CNN/YouTube Climate Debate
Tuesday, 15 December 2009
Today, at 8 a.m. ET, a panel of world climate leaders, among them former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and journalist Thomas Friedman, will gather in Copenhagen and answer the top questions that you submitted to the
CNN/YouTube Climate Debate channel
.
You can watch them address the issues that matter to you in real-time: We'll be live-streaming the debate at
www.youtube.com/cop15
.
Thank you for making this event truly international. We received thousands of questions from Italy to Brazil, Nigeria to New Zealand. To get a scope of just how many countries are represented, see
this map
, which depicts global submissions through a Google Earth layer.
And if you didn't have a chance to submit a question, but still want to raise your voice about climate change, we encourage you to join the discussion on Twitter during the debate using hashtag #cnnytdebate.
Steve Grove, Head of News & Politics, recently watched "
Please Help the World
."
Learn how to be a gadget reviewer
Thursday, 3 December 2009
With 40,000+ subscribers and a couple of
hit videos
, the folks behind the
phonedog
channel know a thing or two about making popular product-review videos (in their case, mobile phone reviews). In the spirit of the holidays, they've kindly agreed to share their secrets with you, to help the next generation of gadget reviewers rise up on YouTube.
Ask any question you like about how to be an effective gadget reviewer by leaving a comment on -- or uploading a response video to --
this video
. phonedog will review your questions and then make a tutorial video, uploaded around December 15, to help give you your start in this field. Take their advice or leave it, but definitely test it out, particularly on any hot new gadgets you or your friends receive this holiday season. We'll be featuring three of the most promising new reviewers, as selected by phonedog, on the YouTube homepage during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in early January.
For more details, Noah from phonedog lays it all out:
Mia Quagliarello, Community Manager, recently favorited "
The Muppets: Bohemian Rhapsody
."
A Live Stream to Save Lives: Alicia Keys and YouTube Team Up to Fight AIDS
Wednesday, 2 December 2009
It's no secret that AIDS is one of the deadliest diseases facing our world today. Since the beginning of the epidemic, almost 60 million people have been infected with HIV and 25 million people have died of HIV-related causes. But did you know that some of those hardest hit by AIDS are children? The disease has killed over 2 million children, and in sub-Saharan Africa it has orphaned close to 15 million.
That's why, today, on World AIDS Day, we're partnering with Alicia Keys and her organization,
Keep a Child Alive
, to present a live-streamed benefit concert at 8 p.m. (EST). We're also encouraging everyone to
donate $5
to provide the life-saving medication, support, and orphan care to keep these children alive. Learn more from Alicia herself about this important effort:
You can make a difference today. Please tune in
here
at 8 p.m (ET) to watch Alicia Keys and
donate
to help save the lives of millions of children living with HIV/AIDS.
Michele Flannery, Music Manager, and Ramya Raghavan, Nonprofits Manager, recently watched "
The Lazarus Effect.
"
Automatic Captions in YouTube
Friday, 20 November 2009
Accessibility of online video is an important challenge that Google and YouTube are committed to. Our US colleagues have announced exciting advances in captioning on YouTube and it's great to see the University of New South Wales is a partner for the initial roll-out of this new feature.
Ishtar Vij, Policy Team, Google Australia & New Zealand
The rest of this blog is cross-posted from the
Official Google Blog
Since we first
announced captions
in Google Video and YouTube, we've introduced multiple caption tracks, improved search functionality and even automatic translation. Each of these features has had great personal significance to me, not only because I helped to design them, but also because I'm deaf. Today, I'm in Washington, D.C. to announce what I consider the most important and exciting milestone yet: machine-generated automatic captions.
Since the original launch of captions in our products, we’ve been happy to see growth in the number of captioned videos on our services, which now number in the hundreds of thousands. This suggests that more and more people are becoming aware of how useful captions can be. As we’ve explained in the past, captions not only help the deaf and hearing impaired, but with
machine translation
, they also enable people around the world to access video content in any of 51 languages. Captions can also
improve search
and even enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they're looking for.
However, like everything YouTube does, captions face a tremendous challenge of scale. Every minute, 20 hours of video are uploaded. How can we expect every video owner to spend the time and effort necessary to add captions to their videos? Even with all of the captioning support already available on YouTube, the majority of user-generated video content online is still inaccessible to people like me.
To help address this challenge, we've combined Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in
Google Voice
to automatically generate captions for video. The captions will not always be perfect (check out the video below for an amusing example), but even when they're off, they can still be helpful—and the technology will continue to improve with time.
In addition to automatic captions, we’re also launching automatic caption timing, or auto-timing, to make it significantly easier to create captions manually. With auto-timing, you no longer need to have special expertise to create your own captions in YouTube. All you need to do is create a simple text file with all the words in the video and we’ll use Google’s ASR technology to figure out when the words are spoken and create captions for your video. This should significantly lower the barriers for video owners who want to add captions, but who don’t have the time or resources to create professional caption tracks.
To learn more about how to use auto-caps and auto-timing, check out this short video and our
help center article
:
You should see both features available in English by the end of the week. For our initial launch, auto-caps are only visible on a handful of partner channels (list below*). Because auto-caps are not perfect, we want to make sure we get feedback from both viewers and video owners before we roll them out more broadly. Auto-timing, on the other hand, is rolling out globally for all English-language videos on YouTube. We hope to expand these features for other channels and languages in the future. Please send us your
feedback
to help make that happen.
Today I'm more hopeful than ever that we'll achieve our long-term goal of making videos universally accessible. Even with its flaws, I see the addition of automatic captioning as a huge step forward.
*
Partners for the initial launch of auto-caps:
UC Berkeley
,
Stanford
,
MIT
,
Yale
,
UCLA
,
Duke
,
UCTV
,
Columbia
,
PBS
,
National Geographic
,
Demand Media
,
UNSW
and most
Google
&
YouTube
channels.
Posted by Ken Harrenstien, Software Engineer
How We Think About Social
Thursday, 19 November 2009
Social features like commenting, rating, video responses and even just emailing or IMing a video's link have always been a part of the YouTube experience. So that's why we spend a lot of time here thinking about how to make the site an even more social place. We're especially focused on wanting to make it as easy as possible for you to find the people you know on YouTube and to follow their activity (what videos are they rating? favoriting? commenting on?) by subscribing to their channel; it's a great way to stay up on what they're into as well as discover new content yourself. As you consume these videos and start sharing your own
,
you in turn "feed"
your
friends a tasty helping of video goodness. It breaks into this virtuous distribution cycle:
As we've built these tools directly into YouTube itself, with things like
friend suggestions based on your Gmail address book
and
connecting your YouTube account to social networks
via our
AutoShare feature
, we've started to see people becoming even more social. Some of this activity is hard to quantify -- every day millions of YouTube links are sent via email, IM, Twitter and other communication methods --
but we can tell you that:
Over one million people are AutoSharing videos to Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader
Each AutoShared Tweet you send out from YouTube turns into an average of seven new sessions on YouTube.com
Over a million people have found and subscribed to at least one friend on YouTube based on our Friend Suggest feature
Most Tweeted video yesterday?
Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance"
More than one million new subscriptions are created every day
We hope these numbers will only rise as we focus on giving you the tools you need to connect with the people who matter most to you. In the process, expect to be entertained and informed by the videos circulating amongst your most trusted friends, subscribers and networks. You can get started today by ensuring that you're discoverable on YouTube (click
here
and check off "Let others find my channel on YouTube if they have my email address") and by connecting your account to your external networks via AutoShare (click
here
to set that up).
What do you think "social" on YouTube means, and where would you like to see it go? Leave a comment below.
Brian Glick, Product Manager, and James Phillips, Software Engineer
1080p HD Is Coming to YouTube
Thursday, 19 November 2009
We're excited to say that support for watching 1080p HD videos in full resolution is on its way. Starting next week, YouTube's HD mode will add support for viewing videos in 720p or 1080p, depending on the resolution of the original source, up from our maximum output of 720p today.
As resolution of consumer cameras increases, we want to make sure YouTube is the best home on the web to showcase your content. For viewers with big monitors and a fast computer, try switching to 1080p to get the most out of the fullscreen experience.
Just how much larger is 1080p? Take a look at the following screenshots from
this video
:
Standard - 360p
HQ - 480p
HD - 720p
HD - 1080p
Have an HD camera? We would love to see your awesome 1080p videos! Be creative and choose subjects that really show off the beauty of your camera. We will run the best examples on our homepage in a future spotlight.
And those of you who have already uploaded in 1080p, don't worry. We're in the process of re-encoding your videos so we can show them the way you intended.
Billy Biggs, Software Engineer, recently watched
"Toy Story 3 - Official Teaser Trailer [HD]."
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