Alex coleman's Profile

Been a while since your last good scare? Then check out the new round of short horror films in The YouTube Screening Room, our destination for top independent films from the film festival circuit.

This series of shorts, which have played at some of the world's most prestigious festivals, including Sundance, Tribeca and London, have something in common beyond their caliber. From sadistic serial killers to beautiful zombies to tales of romance gone horribly, horribly wrong, these films all take "twisted" to the next level.



This collection comes courtesy of Warner Bros.'s "The Orphan", coming to theaters July 24, which tells the story of a couple terrorized by the seemingly innocent child they adopt after the death of their baby girl.

Boo!

Sara Pollack
Entertainment Marketing Manager
The YouTube Team

It's been a week since we announced that a new version of channels is coming, and we wanted to give you an update on our progress. Well over a million of you have now opted in to the beta, and many of your channels are looking really good -- we were just admiring shotscience's and muzik4machines's designs.

Your feedback over the past two months has shaped -- and will continue to shape -- the evolution of this whole site and particularly your channels. We've been hard at work fixing some of the bugs you've pointed out, as well as taking care of some of your top requests. For instance, we're happy to announce that we'll be supporting transparency so that your backgrounds can indeed shine through -- this will be done prior to switching over to the new channel design. And some of the bugs we've taken care of now include reducing the occasional sluggishness that some users have reported, as well as fixing the scrollbar that broke for some when ads appear. (For a longer list of fixes and additions, go to our beta blog.) We'll share more of our progress later, too.

As always, you can learn more about how to switch to the new version of channels by visiting our Help Center, where we also have some tips on setting things up. We also encourage you to continue pointing out bugs in the beta and letting us know how we can improve. Best places to comment are below in this blog, in our beta blog or in the comment portion of our announcement video.

Best,
Brian Glick
Product Manager
The YouTube Team

Many of you have been asking for an increase in the size limit of your uploads. We're happy to announce that the size of standard uploads has doubled from 1GB to 2GB. The increase means you can upload longer videos at a higher resolution as well as large HD files directly from your camera.

In addition, the team's implemented some new features to make it easier for you to show these videos off to the world. The changes allow you to share links directly to the HD version of your video, as well as embed the HD version on your blog or website. Here's how:

* To share a link to the HD version of your video, simply append &hd=1 to the end of the URL. This means the video will start playing in HD as soon as someone follows the link. Cool, huh?

* To embed the HD version of a video on a website or blog, click the 'customize' button to the right of the embed box on the video page. Some options will appear; simply check 'play in HD'. The embed code that's generated will cause the video to start playing in HD as soon as a viewer clicks play. We recommend embedding HD videos at the largest size (853x505) for maximum enjoyment.

If you haven't yet started uploading your content in HD, see our Help Center article for more information on how to do so. You can also browse some popular HD videos here.

Enjoy!
Ryan Junee
Product Manager
The YouTube Team

You may remember the inaugural edition of Adopt a Feature, for which you made videos about AudioSwap, Country Pulldown, Insight, Playlists, Quick Capture, and Subscriptions. These videos generated 818,698 views (they're all collected here) and a bunch of them even got featured on our homepage. At the end of the two month run, thecomputernerd01 was crowned the Adopt a Feature king, thanks to his zany explanation of how the country/language pulldown menus work -- a video that accounted for a third of all of the program's views. He also got this awesome T-shirt.

Josh took a break from ribbing his grandpa to tell you why you should get involved with Adopt a Feature v2.



In case you're still buzzing from Josh's high-energy onslaught, here's what you need to know: Make a video about any or all of the features on the list below (click on the name of the feature to get more information about it). Include the name of the feature and "adoptafeature" in the tags -- this is important; it's how we'll locate your video for inclusion on our channel and possibly on the YouTube homepage.

* Annotations
* Customize Your Homepage
* Tags
* Quicklist
* Mobile Upload

(By the way, for folks waiting to hear more about the roll-out of new channels, we should have an update in a few days.)

Best,
Hunter Walk
Director, Product Management
The YouTube Team

For a few months, we've been testing a feature for partners that lets them add "Call-to-Action" overlays to their YouTube videos to help them drive traffic to other websites. Many have used the feature in creative ways, such as collecting signatures or driving song downloads.

Today we are making Call-to-Action overlays more broadly available by launching the feature as an option for anyone who uses Promoted Videos. Just go to ads.youtube.com and you'll quickly and easily be able to both increase views of your content and drive traffic to an off-YouTube website at the same time.

For more information, check out our recently launched YouTube Biz Blog.

Thanks,
Thai Tran
Product Manager
The YouTube Team