Kiran Upadhyay

Felix Kjellberg aka PewDiePie is the king of the YouTubers. He’s a YouTube star with 9 billion views and Expressen, a Swedish newspaper, estimated that he made $7 million last year on advertising, a feat that is no longer an outlier in the burgeoning world of online stardom. In the video Kjellberg described his 5 year career as a YouTube star whose entire oeuvre is dedicated to playing video games while others watch. His videos get over 5 million views per episode. Read More

Here is a small but fun experiment that YouTube is rolling out today: videos that let you switch between different camera angles while the video is playing. These multi-angle videos are only an experiment right now and there’s only one video that actually showcases this feature so far. If you want to give this a try, head over to Madilyn Bailey’s YouTube channel — she’s a popular indie artist on YouTube who is probably best known for her cover songs. The YouTube team took her performance at the most recent YouTube Music Night and turned it into a multi-angle video. As YouTube tells me, the process of creating these videos is automatic on the user’s side, but the technology the team developed to support this is not ready to scale to everyone yet. YouTube is not the first video site that is trying this. Over the years, there have been multiple startups that focused on nothing else but developing similar features. And there have been apps like the Marc Cuban- and 500 Startups-back...

Twitter’s not the only one Facebook is battling for control of news and content distribution. With Pages getting quieted down in the feed, Facebook wants to make its home for businesses less like a newspaper that come to you and more like TV channels you turn on. That’s why it’s YouTube that’s getting flattered by the social network with a new design for the Video section of Facebook Pages. All businesses will soon be able to choose a featured video to be displayed extra-large with a live comment feed atop their Page, and cobble together playlists of more of their videos. This makes the Videos tabs of Pages look and feel a lot like YouTube Channels. TechCrunch spotted the new design and features on ABC News’ Page, and the company confirms it testing the format with a handful of Pages, and plans to roll it out to them all in the coming weeks. Facebook’s video product changes come alongside pushes on the monetization front. It just struck a deal with the NFL to show football game...

Here’s something neat. Google has introduced offline video playback for YouTube mobile users. That’s an exciting feature but there’s bad news for most TechCrunch readers: it’s only available on Android devices in India, Indonesia or the Philippines at this point. The company said the update will allow “much of [the] popular YouTube content” in these places to be watched without an internet connection. Videos that support playback will include an offline icon which, once tapped, offers a choice of playback quality. Once cached, each one is available to watch without internet access for up to 48 hours. Google has specifically picked these three markets because of the importance of mobile internet, coupled with the lack of people with data packages — not to mention the sometimes frustratingly poor quality of internet too. “Asia has proven itself to be a mobile-first world in terms of smartphone adoption, but access to high-speed, affordable data remains a big challenge. In respo...

Remember back in November of last year when I wrote that YouTube needed to build its own tool for making GIFs from videos? Some called me crazy. Many, however, agreed completely. It seems YouTube agreed, too. YouTube is now quietly rolling out its own GIF maker. It doesn’t seem to be enabled on all videos just yet, but it’s definitely there for some. Take, for example, pretty much any video from PBS’ Idea Channel (as spotted first by Andy Baio). Click to one of their videos, hit the share button, and GIF away. GIF creation through the tool is quite simple: tap the share button, set your start/end points, set any captions you might want, and create away. The tool is super fast, and YouTube hosts the GIFs themselves. The final look of the tool isn’t too unlike the mockup I did back with that first post, which means I’m totally going to take 100 percent credit for this idea despite the fact it had probably been in the works for months/years. Need to make a GIF now, but YouTub...

Whoops! Just a fun bit of trivia for the coders out there: PSY’s Gangnam Style has been viewed so many times that it broke YouTube’s view counter, making it the very first video to break the reaches of a 32-bit integer. Not sure what the hell that means? Just know that when you’re coding, you often have to consider how you’re storing data like numbers. Do you want a 32-bit integer, or a 64-bit integer? A 32-bit integer* takes up a bit less memory, but can only be used to store numbers from −2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647. A 64-bit integer is a bit heftier in its memory usage, but can store numbers from −9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807. (* WE’RE IGNORING THE MATTER OF SIGNED/UNSIGNED INTEGERS FOR THE SAKE OF SIMPLICITY HERE) You know the Pac Man kill screen, where things freak the hell out after level 256? Similar idea, just with 8-bit numbers versus 32-bit. As of yesterday’s landmark and subsequent code change, YouTube can now theoretically support v...

Microsoft is up to its old tricks again, and just in time for the holidays. The latest ad out of Redmond pits its Surface Pro 3 against the MacBook Air, and with all the holiday cheer and spirit you’d expect in mid-November. Going over all the same features we see listed in every Surface Pro 3 ad, Microsoft talks about the touchscreen and the pen and the detachable keyboard, all the tune of “Walking In A Winter Wonderland.” How festive! This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Microsoft come after Apple’s MacBook Air in commercials. The Surface Pro 3, which starts at $799, has a much easier argument going up against an expensive ultra-thin, premium laptop from Apple than it does against a less expensive iPad Air, or worse, Android tablets that can often go at even cheaper price points. But Microsoft isn’t just competing with Apple on behalf of the Surface Pro. The company is fighting its southern nemesis in the software space, too, with earlier ads pinning Cortana against Siri. ...

After years of capping video playback at 30 frames per second, it looks like YouTube is finally upping the bar. Back in June, YouTube announced that 60 FPS video playback was on the way in “the coming months”. Alas, the only examples of this to pop up since were a handful of EA game trailers that YouTube handpicked to showcase the new, ultra-slick framerate. Sometime in the past few hours, however, it seems the roll out started spreading far and wide. A good number of user uploaded videos shot at 60 FPS are now playing back at their proper framerate, rather than being sliced down to a relatively chunky 30 FPS. It may not work in all browsers (if all else fails, try Chrome. Safari also seems to work. And make sure you’re using the HTML5 Player, though most people will be on that by default by now) — but when it works, it’s gloriously obvious. See, for example, this video of someone playing Nintendo’s Mario Kart 8 (as spotted by Kotaku). Bump the quality up to at least 720p, an...