YouTube streams videos. We all know that. You can’t download them. We know that too. But that knowledge is about to be turned on its head.
The company has said it’s going to trial a system allowing people to download the videos to watch. On the site blog , Thai Tran, YouTube product manager, wrote:
“We’ve started working with a few partners who want their videos shared universally and even enjoyed away from an internet connection.”
Users who partner with the site will be allowed to offer their videos for download under the Creative Commons license, with those downloading paying a fee in order to have a permanent copy of the video.
“Partners could choose to offer their video downloads for free or for a small fee paid through Google Checkout,” Tran added.
Google, which owns YouTube, hasn’t revealed how much it will take from each transaction. The videos will be in the DRM-free MP4 format, so they can easily be transferred to portable devices.
Of course, there are programs that let people grab YouTube videos, but this move will make the content available to everyone.
Initially, YouTube is trialing the new services with the universities – Stanford, Duke, and the University of California. When it’s fully up and running, only approved users will be able to offer their content for download, in order to avoid piracy, according to Vnunet.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?