Is YouTube playing a prank on its users? Or did someone in their technical department just screw up and they finally realized it?
Later last month I posted an article about YouTube finally relaxing the 10 minute video limit, which I found was a stupid rule, based on the fact that as long as the size of the video is under 1 Gig, there’s no real infrastructure overhead related to the duration of the video.
Today, Scott Edwards left me a comment, saying that he noticed that YouTube is enforcing the stupid rule again:
According to a help document on their site, users might have had this option at some point, but they’ve somehow decided it no longer applies:
You can no longer upload videos longer than ten minutes regardless of what type of account you have. Users who had previously been allowed to upload longer content still retain this ability, so you may occasionally see videos that are longer than ten minutes. You can, however, easily change your account type to Director, Comedian, Musician, or Guru, which offer a variety of other features like the ability to add a custom logo, tour date information, and links to other websites.
I understand that in order to get your account type changed, you must meet some traffic minimums (let me know if I’m wrong on this one).
But for sure this limit had been eliminated for all users, so what’s the logic of putting it back?
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Just so you know, the reason for the 10-minute limit is not to save infrastructure costs (as you say, only the file size is relevant to that), but two-fold:
#1, to inhibit uploads of TV shows, movies, and other copyrighted material (TV shows are generally at least 11 minutes long for ¼-hour time slots [4 minutes for commercials], and of course most TV show episodes are at least ½-hour time slots and thus about 22½ minutes). Of course, most people just get around this by breaking them up into parts, and there are numerous illegally uploaded movies and TV shows on YouTube™ to this very day, despite the brazillion-dollar lawsuit from Viacom®).
#2, to increase numbers of individual videos viewed (and thus potential ads displayed on Partner videos and search pages). Obviously, if they’re shorter, people can view more in the same time period. Time, also, is a resource.
Obviously in the net business its not the consumer they care about.
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The 10 minute rule is because of MPEG. anything posted over 10 minutes means they should get payed royalties.
So you don’t own your own content because you’re using cameras which use the MPEG standard to encode stuff, and they’ve licensed themselves so most videos under 10 minutes is royalty free, but go over that, and you must pay. i.e. Google must pay.