I emailed YouTube last week asking them why my 13 minute HTC Touch unboxing video was rejected for being too long when my account was categorized as a director account. I also asked why one of my videos was processed and live in about 20 minutes while the other took over two hours. Here was their response:
“Thanks for your emails. We’re no longer offering the option to upload videos longer than 10 minutes, regardless of your account type. If you see a video on YouTube that’s longer than 10 minutes, it’s probably owned by one of our content partners. There are also some users who can upload longer videos because they were given this permission before the feature was removed. Also, occasionally, depending on site traffic, changes to video and account information on our site can take a few hours to update and synchronize. We’re constantly working to make that happen a lot faster and appreciate your patience.”
So basically, we have a site that was built completely on end-user content now turning away users that want to upload videos longer than 10 minutes. I’ve had a YouTube account for a couple of years, and I thought I had requested “Director” status, but it seems either I hadn’t or it was never granted – and now I can’t get it. It’s bad enough the the quality is complete crap on YouTube, but it has such a large user base posting videos there gives you good exposure. Ideally my videos will be under ten minutes, but if I get on a roll and a video happens to go over 10 minutes, it’s idiotic that I’ll then have to break it up into two pieces. I’ve been testing DailyMotion and the video quality looks quite good compared to YouTube – they encode at 640 x 480 I think. So do I go for quality or put up with the length limitations of YouTube and the lower quality? Decisions, decisions.