YouTube

6 Places to Get Better New Music Recommendations

There’s a lot of music out there—services such as Spotify boast more than 30 million tracks—with new songs and albums dropping every week. So how do you cut through the noise? Here are six places you can find new music to suit your tastes, based on what you’re already interested in. YouTube This is a…

Spotify Is the Best Streaming Music Service

There, I said it. As countless Rdio fans sit back helplessly as their accounts go dark, it’s time to be blunt. Spotify continues to outpace its growing army of competitors, and if you’re going to spend money on a streaming music service, you should sign up for Spotify Premium. Or save a few bucks and…

YouTube’s Putting Its Money Where Its Mouth Is on Fair Use

YouTube announced today that it’s going to cover the legal costs of copyright lawsuits facing a few videos that they believe are strong examples of fair use. This is one of those situations where good PR and good work actually coincide. YouTube could not exist without the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Sites that host…

YouTube Music Is Breathtakingly Pointless

The new YouTube Music app is a failure. YouTube is quietly one of the most powerful forces in digital music, and this—THIS!—is the app that’s supposed to change everything. It changes nothing. Announced last month, YouTube Music is a cornerstone of YouTube’s strategy for getting people to sign up for its new YouTube Red subscription…

You Can Download YouTube’s New Music App Right Now

Last month, YouTube introduced us to a number of new initiatives aimed at roping people into a paid subscription. Today, we’re getting our first look at YouTube Music, the service’s tailor-made experience for kicking out the jams. The new app is available for both iOS and Android. In short, the app is designed to flesh…

Twitch Is Streaming Every Single Episode of Bob Ross’ Hypnotic Painting Show

As a kid, Bob Ross and The Joy of Painting on PBS was my kryptonite. My parents knew that if they wanted thirty minutes of child-free silence, they’d switch on that quiet guy with the afro and I’d be freaking spellbound, up until every last titanium white cloud. Well today, Twitch announced it’s channeling that…

YouTube Red, the semi-controversial ad-free video service, is now open for business. Sign up for a free one-month trial here, but don’t expect to find any videos from ESPN. Contact the author at [email protected]. Public PGP key PGP fingerprint: 91CF B387 7B38 148C DDD6 38D2 6CBC 1E46 1DBF 22A8

YouTubers Are Up In Arms About YouTube Red 

The past 24 hours have been a tortured 24 hours for YouTube professionals and their fans. The famously free video site announced a new paid service called YouTube Red, and nobody’s really sure what it means. But some YouTubers are already making end-time predictions. Those predictions fall on the dramatic end of the reaction spectrum,…

Don’t Buy Your YouTube Red Subscription On iOS

YouTube Red, the long-anticipated $10-a-month ad-free YouTube, launched today. Whether or not watching Hillary ads is worth $10 a month is up to you, but one thing is very obvious: don’t get our subscription via the App Store. https://gizmodo.com/youtube-really-wants-you-to-pay-for-youtube-1737829631 Apple has the option to subscribe to things on iOS, using your existing method of payment…

YouTube Red: $10 Per Month For Video With No Ads, Plus Streaming Music, Plus Original Content

YouTube’s taking big steps towards transforming itself into a media service that you pay for like you pay for Netflix. Fancy YouTube! Aren’t you psyched? YouTube made a bunch of announcements today promoting its new subscription service, YouTube Red. For $10 a month, the service banishes ads, and allows you to save videos offline, and…

You Can’t Watch This Awkward Comedy About a Fake Computer Show Without Squirming 

“Computer Show” is my new favorite thing. An apparent spoof on PBS’s infamous “Computer Chronicles,” the YouTube series takes place in 1983 but features guests from the present-day wowing awkward hosts with incredible technology we take for granted. It’s hilarious, if only because it masters the early-’80s public access TV graphics and production quality so…

Google’s Using Neural Nets to Make YouTube Thumbnails Suck Less

YouTube thumbnails can be dreadful—but Google’s been teaching its algorithms to improve the previews they generate by using neural networks. While it’s possible to upload a custom thumbnail to accompany a YouTube video, many people don’t bother. In those cases, Google samples one frame every second from the video as you upload it, then runs…

YouTube’s iOS app now lets you edit videos on your phone before you upload them.

Simulating a Universe With a Computer: Yes, This Is Complicated

TheEAGLE Project isn’t some neo-Nazi project to bring a cloned Hitler to life; rather, it’s trying to simulate a universe inside a supercomputer. Yes, it’s exactly as complicated as it sounds. The project, housed at the University of Durham in the UK, is trying to understand how galaxies form and evolve. It starts using the…

Mutiny, Booze, and Playboy In Orbit: Here’s a YouTube Channel About Vintage Space History

Public interest in the future of humans in space is reaching new heights–it’s almost easy to forget about the early history of space travel, which involves plenty of lesser-known anecdotes about booze, space mutinies, and contraband girlie magazines. Spaceflight historian Amy Shira Teitel runs the YouTube Channel Vintage Space. She posts two new videos every…

Why One Random Web Address Can Crash Chrome

As it turns out, one sixteen-character garbage URL is enough to bring Google’s mighty browser crashing to its knees. Here’s the computer science behind the bug. As Tom Scott explains in the surprisingly understandable video above, it’s all to do with how computers parse binary files. The %30%30 at the end of the URL gets…

This Engineer on YouTube Will Teach You To Make Longboards and Ziplines

Maker Faire NYC hits the Big Apple this week, so to get you in the mood for homemade robots, inventions and all things DIY, here’s a YouTube channel that teaches you to make almost anything. It’s called I Like to Make Stuff, run by Bob Clagett, a former Dell engineer based in Savannah, Georgia. He’s…

Why Winning the Dancing Baby Lawsuit Is a Big Deal For the Internet

In 2007, a home video of a baby dancing to Prince’s 1984 masterpiece Let’s Go Crazy was uploaded onto YouTube. Eight years and a few dozen lawyers later, a federal appeals court has ruled that uploading the video was an OK thing to do — a judgement that is of surprising importance to the rest…

How To Stop Videos From Auto-Playing in Your Browser

Whether it’s a music clip on YouTube, a Flash ad on a news site or the latest viral sensation on Facebook, most videos you come across on today’s web want to get going without any input from you—and that can cause problems with bandwidth as well as audio output you weren’t expecting. Here’s how to…

How Filmmakers Use Aspect Ratio Tricks in Movies

Often, it’s the things you don’t notice that make or break a movie, and there’s no more subtle mindfuckery than playing tricks with aspect ratios. In this wonderfully educational short video, Now You See Itexplains how different aspect ratios — and switching between them — can be used as thematic devices in movies. I’m ashamed…