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Getting Started with YouTube

Since our office launched California's official YouTube channel, we have had many questions about how to get started. First off, here are some definitions:

  • Account: You can create a free YouTube account at http://youtube.com/signup.
  • Channel: A channel is a user's page. It contains a user's profile information, videos, favorites, etc.
  • Friends: You can invite other users to be your friends. This allows you to share private videos with each other.
  • Playlist: You can add videos to playlists http://youtube.com/my_playlists to play them in order or share the list of videos with your friends.

There are two ways to upload your videos to YouTube:

USE CALIFORNIA'S CHANNEL

Benefits: Ease of use, and California's channel can host videos of up to 1024MB.

  1. Send a link to your video file to info@eservices.ca.gov, including the video name, description, and keyword tags. We will let you know when it is posted (usually within hours). That's it.

CREATE YOUR OWN YOUTUBE CHANNEL

Benefits: Control over your own channel, department branding, video uploads, comments, subscriptions.

  1. Create a YouTube account at http://youtube.com/signup. Your username will be your channel name. For example, our user name is californiagovernment, and our channel is www.youtube.com/californiagovernment.
  2. Design your channel, upload a profile picture, and add a description.
  3. Upload videos that are less than 10 minutes in length (smaller than 100MB). YouTube accepts video files from in the .AVI, .MOV, .WMV, and .MPG file formats.
  4. Organize your videos and create video playlists.
  5. There is more you can do, and YouTube has a help center that can answer most of your questions.
  6. Let the eServices Office know what your channel is. California's channel is the "portal" to all of the State YouTube channels, and we want to make sure we link to all of them.

For more information and good practices, please visit http://www.webtools.ca.gov/Multimedia/Video_Services.asp.