YouTube: Here's How We Just Became Your iPhone's Video Camera


YouTube Headquarters in San Bruno, Calif. is a bustling place these days. And Mashable happened to be there on a particularly bustling day — the launch of YouTube Capture, an iPhone-only app launched with little fanfare that will likely overtake the device's default video camera.

You may not have installed Capture yet — indeed, it took most of Monday for it to even show up in the App Store's search results. But we're betting you will; it is as essential to your iPhone experience as its corporate sister product, Google Maps for iOS 6, which has been downloaded 10 million times in a few days.

Capture does what its name suggests: captures video instantly, and posts it to YouTube, with some neat enhancements, in a click or two. You can share the result to Twitter or Facebook, and it plays nice with the built-in Apple video library, syncing back and forth.

The YouTube folks I talked to exuded an air of quiet confidence about the app Monday. "We think it serves a number of use cases a lot better [than the iPhone video camera]," said Andy Berkheimer, engineering manager. "Particularly spontaneity: when you see something going on, you want it.

"You can configure the app in a mode where it'll turn the camera on the minute you open it. It's not set up that way, but if you want it to behave that way you can."

(You can also set it up in such a way that it only records video when you've turned the phone sideways — a boon to those of us who fear the pervasive danger of Vertical Video Syndrome.)

Compare that to what you have to do on an iPhone to take video natively — open it up the regular Camera app, then fiddle with a tiny slider at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.

If you're lucky enough to make the slider work first time, and don't actually take a still picture instead, then you'll still have to be lucky that the spontaneous moment you were trying to capture is still happening. Cats and kids wait for no slider-fumbling.

So Capture would be enticing enough if it were pure video. But it's also the first app to do supremely easy YouTube uploading. "You've been able to upload with third-party apps," says product management director Shiva Rajaraman, "but it's always been an experience where you have to open this thing up up first, and it's about viewing and finding their videos. Ours is focused on speed."

Here's the point in the article where I confess I can't remember the last time I uploaded a YouTube video to my own account for fun, only to the Mashable account for work. The process just feels like work; even YouTube thinks so. "it's often felt like enterprise workflow," says Berkheimer. "There are like 10 steps."

Capture lets you add some image optimization with a click, some rights-free music with another click. (Hint for feline lovers from YouTube: the music marked "Spy" is said to be the best for cat videos.) You can edit the beginning and end point if you wish.

But none of this is necessary. If you want to upload your video to the entire YouTube-viewing world in a single click — or Facebook, Twitter and Google+ in two clicks — you can. Something shot seconds ago can start going viral seconds later.

This is going to be particularly useful for on-the-scene news reporting, whatever form it takes in the future. YouTube has been one of the primary means for information on the conflict in Syria, for example; an app this easy must triple or quadruple the number of potential citizen journalists, for want of a better term.

Syria, surprisingly, is just the sort of thing YouTube was thinking about when it created Capture. "Frankly, one of the things that inspired this was looking at a lot of the protest videos that come up on the site," Rajaraman says. "Now think about what that means. People are just grabbing what they have, opening up the default app.

"And those videos get shared very quickly. Speed is of the essence. And there's all this enhancement technology you can apply fast, because a lot of these videos are very grainy."

Not Yet, Android Owners

As for why the YouTube team chose to launch Capture on the iPhone only, rather than Google's own Android? It was hard to get a convincing answer on that one. "iOS is a very interesting test bed," Rajaraman said. "We can really get some good feedback." But an Android version of Capture is "certainly something we'll explore."

Given how damn useful Capture is going to be on the iPhone, though, it's hard not to think that Google and its significant subsidiary YouTube are systematically replacing Apple's default system apps with better ones.

Last week it was Maps. Today it was the video camera's turn. What's next?

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