After an end to a test underway since last summer, YouTube, always committed to nurturing the success of its anti-cable TV spin-off, has also dedicated itself to fighting spam spread via bot comments.
The famous Google multimedia streaming platform has inaugurated its pre-Easter week by putting an end to a test, indeed rather appreciated, on iOS but giving new satisfactions to users subscribing to its alternative service to cable TV. At the same time, the big Y has started experimenting with further restrictions to deal with spam bots.
Last August, YouTube took to testing the functionality of the PiP, Picture-in-Picture that allowed content to be played in a floating window on iOS while doing other things. Apparently, the test was terminated by Google, as witnessed by several users to whom, in the web and mobile version of the platform, a banner appeared warning them that the function in question they were trying was disabled. By going to the web page where the big Y lists and allows you to enable participation in its functional tests, moreover, the PiP on iOS is no longer mentioned.
According to 9to5Google, however, for many users who had previously activated the test, the PiP continues to work and the function is still activated by installing YouTube on a new iPhone and logging into a Premium account: to date, only Premium users who have never tested the function, don’t have it. It should also be noted how, in March, Google still released the function in question in favor of YouTube TV for iOS and how, in the USA, the same function will be made available to users free of charge but with the support of advertising and without the music content.
Another news regarding YouTube was confirmed by the same platform, which also reported how, from the activity of its moderators and machine learning systems, about 950 million comments that violated the rules of the Community were removed. As the complaints of various popular Creators and YouTubers revealed that this was not enough and that, at the bottom of the videos of their Channels, Spam comments (often with links to content forbidden to minors, with cryptocurrency-themed promises, often aimed at spread spyware and viruses) were now “out of control”, YouTube has started to implement an experimental option, Increase strictness, available to those who manage the channels that, essentially, with antispam filters (similar to those that, by placing them in quarantine, avoid potentially damaging citations from getting to the comments section bypassing the action of the moderators), provide an extra “pre-posting level of text protection”.
Finally, a novelty limited to the USA, where the YouTube TV service has been in business since 2017 as an alternative to cable TV with a lot of unlimited cloud DVR available. To celebrate the fifth anniversary of the initiative, Google has decided to give two weeks of subscription, and a $ 50 discount for the first month, to new subscribers, also announcing that the basket of streaming TVs now includes 5 new additions (The Weather Channel, Comedy.TV, G4 TV, Justice Central TV, Recipe.TV).