New Brand Channels Coming Soon

As you may have seen from this blog post, our new channel design is coming out of beta and will now be the default option for all new channels. We wanted to let you avid readers of Biz Blog know how brand channels will be affected.

If you already have a brand channel, you can switch over to the new design by clicking on the "Upgrade my channel!" link on your Channel Design page. Some channel owners have opted into the new design already (nalts, LisaNova, sxephil, The White House, and University of Phoenix). For now you will be able to revert back to your old design very simply, but please note that we will be automatically transferring all brand channels over to the new design on July 29th 2009.

We will be keeping almost all existing features of brand channels, but we feel the new design offers a better channel experience for viewers, with the new "video navigator" providing an interactive watch experience where your users can browse through and watch multiple videos without leaving the channel. It also helps channel owners customize their channels in a simple manner, choosing exactly which videos and playlists to present to visitors. Finally, as users will spend more time watching videos on channels, we want to make sure that our content partners are able to run advertising against their videos whether on the watch page or on a channel.

Once your channel is transferred, most elements (including gadgets, if you have them) will be ported across automatically. If you have a customized background image, it may need to be re-uploaded and re-arranged to fit the new layout, and some custom colors may need to be tweaked. Please also note that all background images will now be hosted by YouTube and that we have increased the file size to 1MB.

Posted by Brian Glick, Product Manager