News & Reviews:   YouTube

If you frequently watch YouTube videos on your desktop computer, then the annoying overlay ads covering a small portion of the video should be familiar to you. Well, even the Google-owned video platform agrees that the overlay ads are intrusive and has announced that it will be removing them beginning next month.

Recently appointed YouTube CEO Neal Mohan recently shared the platform’s priorities for 2023 via an official blog post. Among others, Mohan announced that the company would be introducing new generative AI tools for creators “in the coming months”.

YouTube is currently testing a new higher-quality 1080p option that is currently available for a small group of YouTube Premium subscribers. The new video quality option is called ‘1080p premium’ which has an enhanced bitrate which provides more information per pixel.

If you are a music lover, you know that music streaming platforms offer you more if you subscribe to them. Unfortunately, YouTube Music isn't that great when it comes to features. With that in mind, the company has a new program to curate feedback.

As the year comes to a close, YouTube did a list of the top 10's from various countries including Malaysia. If you are curious about the top creators, artists and videos that captured the collective imagination of fans in Malaysia, you're at the right place. 

India will become the second country to get YouTube Courses. The feature launched in July allows channel owners to offer tutorials or classes as paid videos to the audience. Previously, it was only available in the States, but it seems that YouTube is ready to offer it somewhere else.

YouTube is currently testing a new video queuing feature on its Android and iOS apps which is similar to the one found on the web version of the platform. With this feature, users can “Add to queue” any video that they want to watch next, a functionality that users have always asked for.

TikTok is testing a new horizontal full-screen mode. It basically allows the videos to expand for users to watch them horizontally, which works just like the one on YouTube.

YouTube has revealed that it will be introducing custom global emotes for comments and live chats on the platform. Called YouTube Emotes, the feature is similar to the one popularised by the Amazon-owned live streaming platform Twitch.

YouTube Shorts is the video streaming company’s answer to TikTok and it looks like the Google-owned company may also be competing with TikTok Shop, the unique shopping features found on TikTok. Starting in the United States, YouTube is currently testing shopping features and affiliate marketing on Shorts with eligible creators.