YouTube Blog

This.

I was in Microsoft, part of an org which pulled in billions of dollars in double digits annually. When doing planning and visioning exercise, time and again we would never focus on scenarios which seemed to be ‘trivial’ (translating to hundreds of millions dollar revenue oppurtunity), as we had limited headcount and finite amount of time to execute.

Startups don’t realize how constrained are the product teams in big organizations, much more than many startups. Every headcount, every contract worker (if they are allowed at all) need to be fought for. And then there is bureaucracy - post planning and spec’ing it is impossible to do any sort of minor pivot, once the juggernaut starts rolling there is no stopping, no room for even a pause to evaluate a new threat.

I’m not an expert of gaming by any stretch and I’m sure the founders decided on best course of actions based upon their priorities but looking at the YouTube Gaming page (http://youtube-global.blogspot.in/2015/06/a-youtube-built-for-gamers.html), YouTube seem to be aiming for something which is natural extension of what was already happening in YouTube: “More than 25,000 games will each have their own page, a single place for all the best videos and live streams about that title. You’ll also find channels from a wide array of game publishers and YouTube creators.”

I thought the founders were right when they said YouTube Gaming launch is a validation. I’m sure in the initial days YouTube Gaming org would be…

YouTube lifted their limits on videos for some users: http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/12/up-up-and-away-long-videos-for-more.html

"Starting today, we’ll begin allowing selected users with a history of complying with the YouTube Community Guidelines and our copyright rules to upload videos that are longer than 15 minutes."

...

"This launch has been made possible in part by the continued advances in our state-of-the-art Content ID system, as well as our other powerful tools for copyright owners. Over 1000 global partners use Content ID to manage their content on YouTube, including every major U.S. movie studio and music label. We remain as dedicated as ever to building and improving the most sophisticated technology in the world to help copyright owners protect their rights. "

It was only a matter of time before people stopped visiting these sites on their own. The digital content scene in India is much better than in the US.

In the US you pay for watching TV Series online on Netflix. Those series are sometimes delayed by months. In India most of the TV Shows are available to view on the next day on YouTube (http://youtube-global.blogspot.in/2012/03/19000-episodes-of-indian-tv-on-youtube.html)

In the US you pay for streaming music services like Spotify. On the other hand all of the Bollywood songs are available for unlimited free streaming on http://www.saavn.com. They even have a free iPhone/Android app with unlimited streaming (The app and websites use adverts as the main revenue stream.)

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2012/07/google-video-content-moving-to-youtube.html

TUESDAY, JULY 3, 2012
Google Video content moving to YouTube
Later this summer, all remaining hosted video on Google Video will be moved to YouTube. Google Video stopped taking uploads in May 2009 and now we’re moving the remaining hosted content to YouTube as private videos. Google Video users can rest assured that you won’t be losing any of your content as it will be fully available on YouTube, and you can choose to make those videos public on YouTube if you’d like.

If you would prefer to migrate, delete or download your content yourself, you can do so by visiting the Google Video status page prior to August 20, 2012

They claimed to be encoding all new videos uploaded, and to have already processes up to 30% of their entire back-catalogue, and 99% of viewed videos about two years ago. So I'm guessing they're pretty much done by now.

http://youtube-global.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/mmm-mmm-good-youtube-videos-now-served.html#uds-search-results

If I do a similar search to yours, the ones that disappear from the &webm=1 search are all presented to me with Flash, not with HTML5/H.264 but I believe if you embed them in another site you should get the HTML5/Webm version (not actually tested this, just read it as a workaround). You could also try searching for them on a Wii, since it's Youtube app uses Webm.

YouTube actually had something like this available for a while (or still does this?) through Caption Search.[1] If a video had captions available (either user provided or automated), one could search based on the captions on that video. Results would return the video and the time associated with that clip in question.

I am not exactly sure why they discontinued the user experience, since it seems like it could be really useful for finding relevant parts in potentially long videos.

[1] http://youtube-global.blogspot.ca/2012/02/captions-for-all-more-options-for-your.html