While on-demand services like YouTube and Hulu get all the press, live streaming services have posted dramatic increases in viewer engagement over the last year. Time spent watching live online video increased nearly 650 percent in that time, to 1.4 billion minutes a month.
The YouTube team has today confirmed that videos uploaded to the popular video sharing service can now be as long as 15 minutes, allowing those uploading videos 5 more minutes of length than before.
Previously users were only allowed to upload videos of a length up to 10 minutes, with Google…
YouTube decided to increase the video length limit from 10 minutes to 15 minutes. It may seem like a small change, but YouTube is testing the waters before dropping this limitation.
“Without question, the number one requested feature by our creators is to upload videos longer than 10 minutes. We’ve heard you, and today we’re pleased to announce that we’ve increased the upload limit to 15 minutes,” informs YouTube’s blog.
The main reason why YouTube added a 10 minutes limitation back in 2006 was that a lot of users uploaded full-length movies and TV shows. Now that YouTube uses a content identification software and Viacom lost the case against YouTube, Google’s video site can safely remove this arbitrary limitation. YouTube is cautious, so it will release incremental improvements.
“We’ve spent significant resources on creating and improving our state-of-the-art Content ID system and many other powerful tools for copyright owners. Now, all of the major U.S. movie studios, music labels and over 1,000 other global partners use Content ID to manage their content on YouTube. Because of the success of these ongoing technological efforts, we are able to increase the upload limit today,” explains YouTube.
