Youtube Silently Sticks it to Director Accounts

May 29, 2007

As a little followup to my podcast earlier today as well as an excuse to vent, I have just found out today that Youtube has silently stuck it to Director accounts. It wasn’t long ago that you had to actually APPLY for a Director account. With the enhanced account, you would be able to do certain things – one of which was to post videos that were over ten (10) minutes in length. Well, apparently that is no more. We tried to post a new WebbyOnline video presentation today that was about 13 minutes long. Our video got rejected for being too long, even though we have a Director account. I check out their Help center and get this crap.

All videos uploaded to YouTube have a 100MB file size limit. The longer the video is, the more compression will be required to fit it into that size. For that reason, most videos on YouTube are under five minutes long and there is a 10-minute length limit for all videos.

Personally, I think that’s a load of hot air. Our video was 13 minutes long and was less than a quarter of the 100 MB file size limit. So, I don’t see how this has anything to do with the difficulty of getting sub 100 MB files. I did some looking around and it looks like others have gotten the same problem. And another. I then found this story from The Register. It talks about Youtube’s issues with people posting copyrighted video clips and why the 10-minute cap was a response to that. Yeah, well perhaps they caved, because now even Directors can’t go past 10 minutes.

What is amazing to me is the silence with which they did it. I was Googling around about this and found absolutely NOTHING from Youtube announcing the change. I had to find it from other blogs. All patterns seem to indicate they made this change some time around March 2007 and never really told anybody.

We’ll keep using Youtube, but I think they should be more open about this stuff. In the meantime, its time to go open an account at Revver. I might try Google Video, too, although that one is, too, owned by “big Google”.

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  • Get'em David. This policy seems to just punish the folsk with something more to say. I also checked out magnify.net which seems to be pretty kewl so far.

    Magnify.net (probably some kind of limitations) allows you to build your own video portal. I'm still testing.

    Curious, it's been a while but doesn't Google Video have less restrictions than YouTube?
  • David
    Yeah, I do believe Google Video allows longer videos. But, I have not yet tried putting anything up there. We've been using Revver.com. They allow longer videos, and the quality is just better as well.
  • XpanD
    Veoh seems a decent alternative too, as far as I know no limits on either size or time. :)

    I have yet to actually see any limits myself, anyways. :)
  • Samuel Goldsmith
    I am truly amazed regarding the youtube inconsistency. Managed to feed the worldforum with a 13 minutes video of classical music that was performed in Jerusalem by one of the Magnificat Institute students. This feed was through what youtube calls a director's nook. But it was rather disturbing and irritating for youtube's rejection of this director's account 13 minutes video. What is the deal?
  • Chad
    I noticed the same limits for the director's accounts. However, I came across the following youtube page in which they have videos posted within the last few months that are 1 and 2 hours long!!! What's up with that?? How do they get that privilege??

    http://www.youtube.com/user/SpiritofDevotion
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