Category: YouTube

After a bit of teasing and a roll out to the web, the YouTube for Android app is finally starting to get a Dark Mode.  The update is a cloud-side update which means as long as you have the latest version of the Android app on your phone, you will have the update pushed to you behind the scenes and not have to update your app.  For those that are curious, the latest build is version 13.28.54.

The YouTube team at Google appears to be slow rolling this update out so not everyone is seeing it just yet, me included.  This isn’t uncommon for these cloud-side pushes so if you aren’t seeing it yet, chances are good you will see it today or tomorrow.  You’ll know you got the update when you see a pop up in the YouTube for Android app letting you know it is available.

After doing a limited A/B testing of the new look, YouTube has begun a full scale roll out of a new full screen width thumbnails look to the stream site.  Instead of having smaller thumbnails with the titles of the just below them, you have have a widescreen looking thumbnail with the title under it in a cleaner font.

The update appears to be a cloud-side update so as long as you are running the latest version of the app, you should see this new look roll out to you over the course of the next few hours.

YouTube is now broadly rolling out the ability for all users, regardless if you are a YouTube Premium subscriber or not, to utilize the app’s support of Android Oreo’s Picture-in-Picture feature.  By all indications, this is a cloud-side change so as long as you are running the latest version of YouTube on your phone (v 13.24.59 for those keeping score at home), you should see the update now or very shortly.

Up to this point, PiP has been limited to YouTube Red previously and now YouTube Premium as a benefit of the paid service.  With this change, assuming that the content creator has given permission for PiP to happen, all YouTube users should be able to utilize the feature.

The new look YouTube PiP (Picture in Picture feature is now rolling out broadly to everyone this morning.  The new design of the PiP is aimed at providing a bit more information about the video you have in the smaller view window such as the name of the video, not just a thumbnail of the video itself.

Now when you are viewing a video on YouTube and swipe down to put it into the PiP view, you will not only see the video but will see the title of the video as well as the creator of the content in a white panel next to it.

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced this past week at BrandCast in New York that the video streaming and sharing service has now reached a staggering 1.8 billion monthly registered users watching content.  It is a jump of some 300 million since the last update of usage figures were announced back in June 2017.

Perhaps even more staggering is the sheer amount of videos being uploaded on the service.  Roughly 400 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute and the company now has some 10,000 monitors looking through content for sensitivity, criminal or terrorist related videos.  Machine Learning and stricter policies will also help in managing the content on the site too.

YouTube announced today that they have begun the process of rolling out new Official Artist Channels on the platform.  The new channels will migrate videos, lyric videos, news, unplugged sessions and other artist related information all in one place.  This will be the official artist channels, a slight change from the artist channels from last year.

Today, we’re simplifying things even more by bringing together an artist’s subscribers under their Official Artist Channel. Uniting subscribers under one channel means you’ll be able to go deeper and explore all of the content from the artists you love.

If you are subscribed to an unofficial channel, you will automatically be subscribed to the official channel for that artist starting this week.