Sree Tips: YouTube Turns 8
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) - While all the attention has been on the purchase of Tumblr by Yahoo!, there's been other tech news worth noting. YouTube, the immensely popular video sharing site, turns 8-years-old this week.
Sree Sreenivasan, tech expert from our partner network CNET and Columbia University's chief digital officer, was here with some tips and new features you may not know about.
It's hard to believe it's been only eight years since YouTube changed the world, making video watching and sharing online so easy.
Online video existed before YouTube, but nothing like it is now: easy to share, easy to view.
There are one billion users and 100 hours of video is uploaded every minute.
Those are incredible numbers, especially since that number was 72 hours of video uploaded every minute just last year and 48 hours two years ago.
And those billion users watch six billion videos a month.
It's currently YouTube Comedy Week - bringing together dozens of comedians across YouTube for live streams, new content, playlists of content and much more.
YouTube is also now all about channels, not so different from TV. Look for "Recommended Channels" on the right.
YouTube is really emphasizing the channels. If you like one person's video, you can subscribe to a full channel of their videos.
As YouTube spokesperson Matt McLernon told Sreenivasan, "It's a shift from the one-off video experience many people may be used to."
The YouTube Creator Academy is a terrific new way for video creators of all kinds, including a mom and dad at home, to learn how to make better, more popular videos. You can take free, online courses to make better videos. Be sure to take a look.
Other stuff worth checking out is Sree's YouTube channel - http://youtube.com/sreenet
Also, Hunter Walk, former product manager of YouTube, has an excellent post about the lessons from the Google purchase of YouTube that all of us interested in the Yahoo purchase of Tumblr should read. Basically, Google left YouTube alone. Great advice! Click HERE to read it.
Plus, there is TestTube, where you can see what experiments YouTube has in the works.
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Sree Sreenivasan is CBS2′s technology expert, appearing every Wednesday morning at 6:50 am to discuss ways to save you time, money and aggravation. You can find him on Twitter and Facebook and on his personal site. E-mail your questions with "CBS New York" as the subject line.
