YouTube Tests New Site Ideas on TestTube: AudioSwap and Streams
YouTube recently started a new site called TestTube that is there to demonstrate some of the new things that their developers have been working on. As of right now there are two things on TestTube that are just waiting for you to play with: AudioSwap and Streams.
AudioSwap (pictured above) is an awesome idea because we have all sat down and watched videos that have no sound, and they are indeed boring! AudioSwap allows you to add music from artists that YouTube has already licensed to add in your own videos. I just flipped through the list available and noticed that they have some songs by Evanescence, Aretha Franklin, Drowning Pool and Finger Eleven. Oh yeah, and they have a song that I feel a little ashamed of knowing…”TipToe Thru the Tulips with Me” by Tiny Tim. 
You can use AudioSwap with any video that you have already uploaded, and it takes no time at all to add some great music because they have it broken up into categories. Once they continue to expand the selection of songs I’m sure it will become way more popular.
Then there is also Streams (pictured above) which is a clever idea, but could be better. It is almost like a whole new layout to the YouTube site with the most prominent feature being the live chat. This takes comments one step further by allowing users to instantly communicate with other people viewing the same video as you.
One of my favorite Streams features will please anyone with a slow Internet connection. In the bottom-left corner of the screen is a blank area that will queue up the videos you want to watch. You can actually start downloading up to two videos at a time by pressing the corresponding right-arrow that appears once a video is added to the queue. To add videos to the queue simply click on any videos listed across the top of the page or click on the small thumbnails located next to a user’s name. That is a really great idea, but they need to add some other features such as searching for videos or viewing the top videos of the day!
These seem to be the first big announcements for YouTube since Google purchased them back in October of 2006. This “TestTube” is supposed to be the testing ground for ideas that YouTube is working on, but the real question is whether some of these things will make it past this stage. Google seems to be notorious for starting new things and never really finishing them. 
Source: Download Squad
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Hi Ryan!! I couldn’t resist to comment on this post because of the queue/stream pictured on the 2nd screenshot.. all those videos are very funny and many are in my favorite list.. you did pick up the best ones to take the screenshot, didn’t you ?
just to add something useful to this comment, I don’t think that the audioswap thing has much future.. users won’t be spending time to add a song to a clip that is 2 or 3 minutes long.. what I think that might work is that when the user submits a video, youtube says “hey, this video has no sound!! this is no fun at all!! why don’t you pick some of these songs to put it as background? ”
and
Actually the videos that showed up in the screenshot are just what happened to be on the screen at the time. The service doesn’t give you much of a choice when it comes to selecting videos (you can manually enter in a URL if you want) so I’m sure most of the ones on there are the more popular ones.
I agree that YouTube needs to find an easy way to notify users that they should add music to a video. As it is right now people have to go out of their way to use it, which means most people will never even know about it. I definitely think that it has some integration possibilities though.