Since this blog is about video analytics and understanding what authors can do on social media sites, I have started a summary of the features available on the most comprehensive site of all: YouTube. While consulting about video publication and tracking to customers, I have found that it is impossible for people to keep track of the new features on YouTube, what they do and what they don't do. Also, there is no summary of the services list available anywhere else on the Web. So here goes.

This is a series of three articles that points out the different features that YouTube is offering on multiple dimensions.

I am looking here at the following functionalities:

1. Publishing options
2. Metrics
3. Advertising options

YouTube's interface is getting richer every month. It is an experiment on what is possible with video online and will be a great testbed for all of us to learn what works and what doesn't.

Today I'm starting with the publishing options that YouTube offers to video owners.

Rich upload metadata

Upload to YouTube is done in two steps: the first one asks you to enter all the metadata related to the video, while in the second you can either capture video from your webcam or upload a video file. You can also upload batches of videos or videos from a mobile phone.

The upload metadata that YouTube captures covers the following sections:

• Generic metadata
  • Title
  • Description
  • Category
  • Tags
• Broadcast option
  • public or private
• Date & map options
  • Date recorded
  • Location recorded
• Sharing Options
  • allow/moderate/block comments
  • allow/ban comment voting
  • allow/moderate/block video responses
  • allow/block ratings
  • allow/block external embedding
  • allow/block syndication to mobile & TV

A Publisher is a Video Channel

Every publisher on YouTube is also a video publication channel. To turn a channel even more into a social network, YouTube gives publishers many possibilities to change the design, layout and content of their video channel:

• publishers can provide metadata on their channel to make it more focused and more easily findable
  • title
  • description
  • tags
  • change of channel type

• publishers can change the design of their channel
  • theme colour, background colour
  • background image
  • colours, fonts, text colours and background colours of widgets
• publishers can select the featured video on their channel
• publishers can allow/block comments on their channel
• publishers can select with widgets to display on their channel and how to arrange them
  • playlists
  • subscribers
  • friends
  • videos box
  • recent ratings
  • recent comments
  • favorites
  • video log

A little effort put into making your video channel look nicer and be more easily found will go a long way to also help your videos perform better.

Edit video

YouTube enables publishers to improve their uploaded videos:

• Choice of one of three automatically created thumbnails
• Replacement of a sound track with audio from a AudioSwap library

An interesting side-effect of replacing an original sound track with licensed music from the AudioSwap library is that YouTube displays the artist's attribution on that video. It may however be less known that YouTube also takes the freedom to share the statistics on the video use with the artists such as number of views, and may put advertising on that video's page. This is a great way for artists to allow people to use their music for soundtracks while at the same time getting credit and an advertising opportunity. I'm not sure how publishers feel about these side effects though.

Video and text

YouTube allows publishers to attach text to their videos in multiple ways:

• captions / subtitles
• annotations
• speech transcripts

Captions are transcripts of what is happening in the video for the deaf. Subtitles are transcriptions or translations of the spoken text in a video.

YouTube allows publishers to upload a caption or subtitle file and present the text inside the video to the video's viewership. The caption/subtitle file format is restricted right now, but a wider range of formats is expected in the near future.

Speech transcripts do not require the publisher to do anything. Google is currently experimenting with speech-heavy videos to create transcripts using automated speech recognition. These transcripts are available to do searches that point to offsets in the videos as results and indentify the relevant parts of a video to the user.

Textual representations of videos help to improve the accessibility of your videos for a wider audience,while at the same time improving the findability of the videos. These are rich features and we expect there will be more along these lines in the future.

Video sharing features

Publishers are offered rich features for sharing videos and making their videos spread more virally. Aside from the standard "email a link" and "embed this video into a Web page", YouTube has devised some richer sharing features:

• posting video to a named blog
• customize embed with colours and related videos
• embedding a Video Bar
• subscribing to a publisher's channel
• embedding video search
  

Publishers can post a blog post with a video embed directly from any video on YouTube, including their own posted videos. This is particularly useful for people who write a lot of video blogs.

Publishers can adapt the embedded video player to the colours in use on their own site and choose to have related videos appear at the end of playback of that one video.

Publishers can embed multiple videos onto another site by selecting the videos into a Video Bar and embedding the code for this widget. For example, a whole channel can be embedded in this way. The Bar can be horizontal or vertical and other features around it can be adapted, too.

Readers can subscribe to a publisher's channel and be notified as soon as a new video is being posted by that publisher.

Probably the most flexible sharing feature is the ability to embed YouTube video search as a widget into another site.

Video feedback features

Finally, I'd like to point out the ways in which readers are able to provide feedback on videos and publishers:

• giving a rating
• leaving comments
• leaving video comments
• making a video a favorite
• flagging a video as inappropriate
• commenting on a channel
• subscribe to a channel
• make friends with a channel
• subscribe to a publisher's playlist
• subscribe to a publisher's favorites

Summary

Much is being done to offer YouTube users all the flexibility required to publish, view and share videos. The functionality is overwhelming and may be too comprehensive for the ordinary user. The expert however is able to pick and choose the features that help give his/her videos the impact they intend to give them.

YouTube is a testbed of new functionality for all video publishers and time will tell which features will become standard on other sites and which were justan experiment.