E3, Live Streaming Gamers, YouTube Playlists, Vimeo Music, and More [The Reel Web #42]

On this week’s look at the Reel Web YouTube is updating some things about its playlists. Also look at some new options you have for audio and music for your videos from Vimeo and as well as some statistics surrounding the last couple months of online video.

Hey guys, my name is Tim Schmoyer and welcome to another week of the Reel Web where every week we just cover and highlight some of the online video news for you from the week before. And this week there’s a couple major things to highlight. Let’s get started with the statistics that are coming out around the last previous couple of months of online video. It’s June and so that means the first quarter stuff is starting to come out. There’s a couple graphs in particular that I want to talk to you guys about. Especially this one that shows how people are watching more and more video content in the long form. Ten minutes plus. It seems to account for about half of all their video consumption in the last quarter.

Or what about this chart that shows that tablets have actually overtaken desktop computers for viewing online video consumption. And with the sales of more and more smart HGTVs that have web video apps built right into them, more people are watching online videos right on their TVs as well. In fact, that number has more than doubled in just three months from January to March. Back in January the average video length that someone would watch on their TV was six and a half minutes but now here we are, only a couple months later and we’re just shy of thirteen minutes of the average video length that someone watches on their connected TV. So if you’re making some longer form content for online video then you might be encouraged because people are drifting further and further away from fifteen to thirty second little cap videos to watching ten minute plus videos.

If you are someone who uses playlists here on YouTube, and if you’re not you totally should be, there is now more options for embedding those playlists either through our blogs or company websites or wherever you want to put them on the web. On YouTube’s API blog they give you a little bit of snippet of code for you to add to the embed code for that playlist so it will show other video thumbnails from that playlist right there in the embedded video screen when people go to click play.

Other enhancements to YouTube’s playlist feature include now the ability to be able to include just certain segments of your videos in the playlist. Like for example, if you have some videos you want to put in like a suspense playlist but you don’t want to include the entire video, you just want to include the suspenseful part, now you can add those videos to that playlist and have it start playing right at whatever moment in the video you designate that you want that video to start playing. So you can show them only the parts of the video that you want to show them and cut out the rest. This could be really helpful if you want to create teaser playlist or you only want to highlight certain elements to different parts of your videos without having to re-upload those same parts again in smaller clips.

More information on how to do that is in the links below this video here on YouTube, or on ReelSEO.com and also while they’re revamping the playlist, they figured they would change the playlist edit screen as well so you have more options for removing and reorganizing and tagging and changing the videos and all that. So lots of great features that are very helpful and useful coming to YouTube’s playlist.

As most of you guys know from watching previous episodes, Google Hangouts on Air with YouTube live streaming is something that I am really excited about and I love doing it several times myself hanging out with people on my personal Vlog channel and stuff. YouTube Hangouts On Air is just awesome, I love it. But live streaming video content is not limited to just people talking to an audience or live events like a basketball game or a concert. Now more and more people are live streaming their video game action while they sit there and play. YouTube is actually getting in on this too by live streaming E3 for the next couple days so if you are into video gaming, it might be something you want to check out. But also there’s a relatively newer service that is getting more and more attention called Twitch.tv and it’s a program for your computer that lets you live stream your video game play while you sit there and play it, any video games on the PC.

As a video gamer myself I went to the website and started watching some of these live streams and it’s actually really engaging and I had a really hard time pulling myself away from it because I love watching these other people, their game play, the decisions they make, learning from their strategies and everything. But what this has to do with online video is there are now more games actually integrating Twitch.TV into their gaming systems so now you don’t have to use a separate application. You can actually start live streaming your game play straight within the video game itself. Personally this seems to be a great direction to go in, not only for YouTube but also for Twitch.TV and other services, cause as Machinima has clearly proven on YouTube, the gaming industry is huge. So if you’re a gamer and making online video content and you’re thinking about live streaming your game play, you might want to check that out, link below.

Most of us are used to having apps like Netflix or Hulu on our smart TVs or our gaming counsels, but now last week Amazon’s instant TV service came to XBox live. It’s just another way for more and more people to get used to watching online video content on their TV screens which I think will be good for all of us who are creators and marketers in the long run and what’s really cool is if you don’t have an Amazon Prime Account and you want to try it out for 30 days, you can go to Amazon Prime and get a 30-day trial and see what you think of it.

Perhaps the number one question that’s asked on YouTube comments across our videos is what do I do about music? I don’t want to have the pay for royalty free stuff, I want free stuff, but if I used copyrighted stuff I get hit. Vimeo is attempting to offer a solution to that problem by offering tracks that are just a couple bucks or a lot of bucks depending on what range you want to spend and they have a built-in audio editor right there, and I have to say that this audio system from Vimeo for editing your content there in theCloud is way better than YouTube’s audio editing system here. Adding a soundtrack to your video is as simple as choosing a video to enhance, selecting a track and adjusting the length and levels.

YouTube has a much wider selection of tracks, but most of them are kind of like, eh if you’d really want to use them or not, although Vimeo’s collection you have to pay a dollar or two for a track but it’s very high quality music, really good stuff and it edits very nicely right there in their system so definitely worth checking out. You can also purchase the track, download it and probably use it on your videos here on YouTube too if you’d rather do it that way.

Because the background copyright music thing is such a big deal, I would love to hear from you guys, where do you go to get your online music for free? Some of us like me, like the music you’ll hear with this video, I just make it simply with Garage Band, but I know other of you guys grab it from maybe Camtech.com or other cool places so let us know what tools you use to create your music or where you find it online and post those below so we can all learn and share and swap those resources, that would be great.

For our Creator’s Tip video on Thursday we’re actually going to be talking to the founder of SocialBlade.com which is a YouTube analytics site among many other things, and he’s going to talk to us a little bit about how their analytics systems for YouTube differ from the analytics that YouTube gives you and what you can learn from them and for your video creation or video marketing purposes or whatever it is you guys are working. So make sure you subscribe, join us for that and I will see you guys then for our Creator’s Tip video and then again next week for a look at the Reel Web. Bye.