A. Artificial Intelligence and Networking
YouTube is using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in many ways. Let's start by playing a random video of Taylor Swift. After playing it, you can see that the suggested videos is involving Taylor Swift. Also, when you go to the Home button, the videos related to the ones you watched will be flashed. You’ll also notice larger photos, which should help in identifying videos from particular channels. This is a product of AI. There is also the "Up Next" feature since the dataset on YouTube is constantly changing as its users upload hours of video every minute, the AI required to power its recommendation engine needed to be different than the recommendation engines of Netflix or Spotify. It had to be able to handle real-time recommendations while new data is constantly added by users. The solution they came up with is a two-part system. The first is candidate generation, where the algorithm assesses the YouTube history of the user. The second part is the ranking system that assigns a score to each video. Earlier this year, YouTube rolled out a series of changes that allowed users to gain more control over what videos were appearing on their homepage and in their Up Next suggestions, which is powered by algorithms. It introduced a “stop suggesting” feature in the form of a button that would allow you to stop being shown videos from a particular channel. Additionally, it can also create Mix playlist which is a compilation of your frequently played videos. Also earlier this year, the YouTube Android app was updated with a new feature that allowed users to select their favorite topics and customize their Home feed with related videos.
YouTube is a public video-sharing website where people can experience varying degrees of engagement with videos, ranging from casual viewing to liking, commenting or sharing videos. By streaming, the video could be listed in a trend made by them. While many teams are moving on to more complex ecosystems, YouTube really does keep it simple. They program primarily in Python, use MySQL as their database, they've stuck with Apache, and even new features for such a massive site start as a very simple Python program. YouTube uses Google’s proprietary database system they call Bigtable. It’s the same database system that also powers Google the search engine and many other products from Google. It’s very stable and very performance efficient. Also, it’s distributed. So the database is actually stored over thousands of servers all across the world. It’s also got redundancy, which means if any server goes down, there are plenty of backup ones floating around.
B. Reaction
YouTube serve as portal to my 'never ending watch' world. I could delve there for more than an hour just by watching my favorite videos. We could see the trending videos in music, gaming, entertainment, news, etc. By signing in, we could also subscribe to any channels that we would like to follow to keep being updated and we could watch on any device. From my experience in using YouTube, it is really an entertaining application that could beat the boredom and stress in my life. It is also hard to exit this app whenever I play a video and it keeps on recommending similar ones, thus I tend to resume playing it. YouTube is also a great way to earn money and fame. Many vloggers are using the app to gain numerous subscribers in their channel. As well as gaining thousands of views from their published videos. The more subscribers you have, the more people will click on your ads. The more people click on your ads, the more you make a name for yourself, the higher the likelihood of brands offering you sponsorship or merchandise deals. The better known your channel becomes, the greater your chance of joining a multi-channel network. It is like being on a giant upwards-climbing spiral. In this way, the YouTuber will start earning a good sum of money. However, the bunch of ads are really not good. The pop-ups really ruin the mood in the videos. The old YouTube in terms of ads is more acceptable since there were at most one ad per video. They keep telling on buying the premium where there is no ads like Spotify. But for people like us, with no plans on buying, I think it is more okay to have the ads before or after the video and not in between or during the video.
C. Critique
YouTube is a worldwide app with more than five billion downloads on Play Store. It is where we can watch our favorite videos and channels. Through the application of AI and networking, it is easy to browse the recommended videos on the Home tab. We can also see the latest videos uploaded by our favorite channel by clicking the subscribe button. By streaming, we could contribute in adding the views on the videos that we like. We could also click the like or dislike button if we feel good or not by watching it. Additionally, we could comment and/or share the video in our social media accounts. Aside from this, we could also upload videos just make sure that you do not use any copyrighted properties. Some use this app to gain money and fame by having a lots of subscribers and views to their videos. The downside is its multiple ads that can pop up before, during or after the video. However, it can be eliminated if you subscribe to their YouTube Premium.
D. Innovation
I know it is impossible to remove the ads without buying the premium offer but it would be really worthwhile if the ads will pop before or after the videos and not during or in-betweens of the video. This will help in sustaining the mood of the viewers throughout the duration of the video. Another recommendation would be playing it in the background without stopping the video. It is inconvenient to switch to another app like when there is a notification popping up on my device that pulls me into my email, and then switch back to YouTube to resume the video again. I also think they should work more on improving real-time views on every video. When there is a new video uploaded by famous artist/s, several netizens are complaining that the views are freeze and the likes are more than the views. It would also be better if their Up-Next feature is more accurate than the latest especially in watching the series drama. When I clicked the Episode 1, sometimes, the Up-Next would be Episode 10 instead of Episode 2.