Release Notes: Nonprofit Program, Private Sharing, Streams
Nonprofit program launches in Australia and Canada: Like their American and British cohorts, nonprofits in Australia and Canada can now apply to become part of the YouTube Nonprofit Program. Members receive free branded channels, custom thumbnails, longer video uploads, and call-to-action overlays. For more information, and to apply, please go to www.youtube.com/nonprofits.
Easier private video sharing: You no longer need to be friends with someone in order to share a private video with them. You can either generate a special URL that up to 25 people can click on, or select the "Private share with YouTube users" option on the video's details page and write in the username(s), separated by a comma, with whom you'd like to share (see screenshot below). After you click "send," the recipient will see the video in his or her inbox.
Streams retired: Streams was an experimental product launched in TestTube, our ideas incubator, three years ago. We know some of you enjoyed watching videos while chatting with other users, but we've not been able to give Streams the time and attention needed to make it a more mainstream offering. Thus, we've decided to retire it for now as part of our pre-spring cleaning effort, though we hope to build other features that make it easier for you to share and talk about videos with friends.
Spotlight enhancements: The homepage spotlight is a periodic module featuring thematic or timely content selected by YouTube. (If you don't see it on your homepage, add it here.) Used to be we *had* to feature four videos and a channel in the module. But now we have a lot more flexibility: we can spotlight just one video, as we might in a breaking news situation, or multiple videos rotating randomly every time the page refreshes, as we might for a guest curatorship or spotlight featuring many contest entries. This might be hardly noticeable to you, but we're excited about the programming possibilities this change brings.