YouTube Now Ready for Your 15 Minutes of Fame

By Marcus Yam
published

Get ready for even longer videos of cats.

Previously, YouTube had a 10-minute video cap for its uploads. Now, that limit has been bumped by 50 percent, meaning that you can get your 15 minutes of fame now in one single clip.

Joshua Siegel, Product Manager, Upload and Video Management, wrote in the YouTube blog:

We encourage you to take full advantage of this new time limit by making a video of your “15 minutes of fame.” Imagine that this video is all the world will ever know about you: what would you want to communicate? What will be the enduring stamp you’ve left on us all? Tag your video with “yt15minutes,” upload it by Wednesday, August 4, and we’ll select a handful of people to truly gain their 15 minutes of fame by featuring them on the YouTube homepage in a future spotlight.

Why, might you ask, is YouTube only now allowing the extra 5 more minutes? Turns out that it has to do with the content providers.

Well, 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.

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
29 Comments Comment from the forums
  • polly the parrot
    No 15 minute Justin Bieber videos...stang.
    Reply
  • ColMirage
    Yay!
    Reply
  • jrharbort
    They first need to fix their server load issues. Over the past few weeks, my buffer speeds have been getting worse, at random times during the day. Often as slow as 200Kbps. Then it decides to buffer at roughly 20Mbps whenever it feels like it.

    Before people claim I have some sort of malware, guess again. I'm sure others have noticed the slowdowns as of late.
    Reply
  • Abrahm
    jrharbortThey first need to fix their server load issues. Over the past few weeks, my buffer speeds have been getting worse, at random times during the day. Often as slow as 200Kbps. Then it decides to buffer at roughly 20Mbps whenever it feels like it.Before people claim I have some sort of malware, guess again. I'm sure others have noticed the slowdowns as of late.Yeah, I've had issues with videos just not loading, and often.
    Reply
  • Supertrek32
    jrharbortThey first need to fix their server load issues. Over the past few weeks, my buffer speeds have been getting worse, at random times during the day. Often as slow as 200Kbps. Then it decides to buffer at roughly 20Mbps whenever it feels like it.Before people claim I have some sort of malware, guess again. I'm sure others have noticed the slowdowns as of late.I've noticed it as well. One trick I've found is that the various resolutions of a video are often on different servers. There's been many times I've loaded 720p video faster than 360p. Just try changing the resolution (even if you're moving up).
    Reply
  • halodude23
    about time, should make a 1 hour limit, that would be sick!
    Reply
  • bison88
    halodude23about time, should make a 1 hour limit, that would be sick!

    It would be nice. I know YouTube is already sucking an insanely massive amount of bandwidth and space on Googles servers, but they disabled the old trick to make 2 hour videos where you just had to change your settings from a regular to "Director". Now you actually have to be a YouTube Partner and fill out an application which gets reviewed to even be considered.

    At least they are upping it, lets hope it's like their "ever growing email storage" program they have with Gmail.
    Reply
  • Aionism
    That's nice, now give me an option for 480p to be the default quality setting again.
    Reply
  • dEAne
    Yes but YouTube should somehow fix their server problems.
    Reply
  • eddieroolz
    Haven't been on YouTube at all recently, so this is new for me.
    Reply