YouTube Transcodes All new Videos to WebM Format, Re-Encodes Existing Ones

YouTube has already worked on transcoding all videos with the highest views on YouTube to the WebM format. This transcoding covers nearly 30% of all YouTube videos and makes up for 99% of the total views on YouTube. As a rule, YouTube will now transcode all uploaded videos to WebM format too, thereby making the web more open when it comes to video content.
WebM is an open media file format for video and audio on the web. Its openness allows anyone to improve the format and its integrations, resulting in a better experience for you in the long-term.

The entire video catalog of YouTube is massive, given the fact that YouTube adds nearly six years’ worth viewing time of videos every day. The announcement post also boasts of a new processing infrastructure that effectively manages the load between existing YouTube videos and new user uploads, for transcoding and re-encoding to WebM. This ensures a fail-proof method of encoding all new videos, and updating existing videos in the background as well.

Apart from webM, Google also promises to continue supporting the H.264 encoding for videos. Additionally, it has expressed its wish to develop an HTML5 video player as well. You can opt-in for the HTML5 video player here.

This is a big step for YouTube as it tries to unify all its videos into a single codec. Now that Google videos is shutting down, YouTube can be Google’s focus for video content.

YouTube Breaks the Free Music Paid Music Myth. They Pay Equally Well

On one hand where record labels and music companies try their best convincing users to pay for music, YouTube, one of the largest providers of free music has claimed that free music generates as much of revenue as paid music. Not only this, it has also claimed that copyright holders have seen an improvement of up to 300% in revenues from last year with YouTube’s model of free music. This has demystified copyright holder concerns over music providers.

These YouTube claims break the myth behind free and paid music up to a certain extent. For the rest, we should keep in mind that it is YouTube we are talking about. The revenues reported by YouTube are from ad clicks and ad clicks need visitors. YouTube as enough of visitors that helps it generate these statistics and also get enough returns.

YouTube executives have outlined the sources for this income. Wired reports it as,They said the growth was due to traffic increases, particularly on mobile phones; more profitable, optimized ad formats; the “Ad Word“-ization of video content (through which advertisers make videos that users “opt in” to watching); a new crop of curators who increase free music videos through blogs and social networks; more effective sales teams, particularly as part of Vevo (a joint venture between Google, major labels, and Abu Dhabi); and YouTube’s Content ID system, which allows music copyright holders to profit from infringing use of their songs.

With this claim, YouTube breaks the conventional payment model, which is based on direct payment for services. Users instead are generating revenue for record labels by clicking on YouTube ads.