YouTube gets a cleaner, simpler look

Guess who’s gone in for a cleaner, simpler look? It is YouTube. In an official blog post yesterday, the popular video viewing platform shared that considering people come to YouTube to watch the videos they care about, it is important then that it stands out. In the new look that YouTube now embodies, users will notice that the most crucial elements are placed at the front and centre while viewing a video. The video itself is placed right at the top of the page, whereas the subscribe button, social actions and video information are put together combined below the player. 

Users can view the playlists that are available to the right of the video, allowing them to browse through while watching. The cleaner, simpler look, shares YouTube, has been spread across tthe entire site. 

Cleaner, simpler look

YouTube shares further that those using YouTube have been active at subscribing to the channels of their choice. Giving a slight recap, the post shares that last year YouTube started making it simpler for users to subscribe to the channels of their choice by introducing a Guide on the homepage. Explaining the ways of the Guide, the post adds that once a user adds subscriptions to their Guide, they organise the site around their preferences, available for their viewing on YouTube. The next step in this direction is bringing to users their subscription-filled Guide across the site and all device.

YouTube shares that once users subscribe to their favorite channels, the Guide will let them know about the new videos they can enjoy. It will also suggest the latest and greatest channels that the user may like, while also showing them what their friends are sharing across the web. Interestingly, users will also be able to find the Guide and subscriptions on apps across several millions of devices, including Android, iPhone, Playstation 3, Google TV and more.

Hoang Nguyen, software engineer at YouTube, shares in an official blog post that users will be able to view automatic captions in videos in six more languages. The automatic captions are now available in German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Dutch. The post adds that back in 2009, a feature automatically creating captions on YouTube videos in English was introduced. YouTube has since added Japanese, Korean and Spanish.

Nguyen writes, "...automatic captions are an important first step in the path toward high-quality captions for the 72 hours of video people upload per minute." Nguyen goes on to share that there are chances that these automatic captions will have errors, and to this end, creators will have many tools to improve the quality of the captions. 

Nguyen adds that with automatic captions in tow, creators can then download them for editing, or edit them in-line on YouTube. They can also upload plain-text transcripts in these languages, and the same technology will generate automatically-synchronised captions. "You now have around 200 million videos with automatic and human-created captions on YouTube, and we continue to add more each day to make YouTube accessible for all," Nguyen concludes.