How to Turn YouTube Into the Perfect Entertainment Hub
YouTube is great for streaming music and watching funny home videos, but it can also be your primary source for organized online media and offline music. Here’s how to unleash the true power of YouTube and use it for more than just cat videos.
Create and organize your playlists
The core of YouTube’s unleashing power is an organized playlist system. We all watched the video and could not find it later to watch it again or show it to friends. With playlists, you can save all your favorite videos and create music playlists to listen to. Here are the steps to create a playlist in your browser:
- Click the menu button to the left of the YouTube logo at the top of the page.
- Click “Playlists”
- Click New Playlist, add a title and choose your privacy settings before clicking Create.
Now create all the playlists you think you need and tag them according to the types of videos you are watching. For example: I categorize my music by style and genre so that videos are easy to find, but I also have music playlists that can be played when I do a specific task like work or exercise. There is “Acoustic”, “Acapella”, “Music for Yoga” and so on. Movies and TV shows have their own playlists, and I come up with titles for other playlists as I go along, like Funny Things, TED Talks, Game Tutorials, etc. Once you customize your playlists to match videos that you watch and watch on YouTube, you can start building your media collection.
Build your media collection
Easily build your media collection by adding videos to your playlists whenever you come across something you like or find something you’re actively looking for.
You have a “Liked Videos” playlist in your YouTube account. You can think of it like your Evernote Inbox, so every video you thumb up will be saved to this playlist so you can find it later to put it in another playlist. Once you’ve positioned the video where you want it, you can change it (if you want) to keep the Liked Videos playlist up to date and uncluttered. In addition, you have a Watch Later section for videos that are interesting to you, but which you cannot watch at the moment.
You can also save playlists created by other users by clicking on the big “+” in the upper right corner of the playlist and subscribe to the channels you frequently visit so that when you go to your homepage you see their latest videos and never skip the newest content. from them. Then you can organize these videos into playlists as well.
Get more accurate search results
You need to know how to find the best videos to grow your collection, and YouTube’s search engine is more intuitive than you think . With just a couple of additional words, you can narrow down your choices and find the videos you really want. Here are some examples:
- Limit your search to recent videos by adding “, this week” or “today” after your search. Example: “Lifehacker, this week.”
- Find movies without going to the movie channel using “movie”.
- Use the allintitle operator and quotation marks around your query to find an exact match. Example: allintitle: “google go gaga”
There is also something else where they came from, and they are all equally simple. Check out the full list on this Digital Inspiration form . Use them to simplify your search by limiting your search results and finding the videos you want faster.
Grow your collection of movies and TV shows
There are some pretty cheap movies and TV shows on YouTube, and their collection is bigger than you might think. The Movies Channel features popular films such as Transformers, Pitch Perfect and 22 Jump Street at a lower cost than other online retailers such as iTunes. For example: the hit musical Pitch Perfect is $ 14.99 on iTunes , whileYouTube is only$ 12.99 . There are similar price differences for favoriteTV shows like Family Guy, Glee, and NCIS. Buying movies and TV shows on YouTube means they’re stuck there and you need an internet connection to watch them, but it might be worth it to buy the movies and shows you want that you don’t want to pay inflated prices for. You can even watch content from your mobile devices and stream it to your set-top box just like any other YouTube video.
Take Music Offline With Music Key
Once you have mastered your YouTube music collection, all you have to do is turn it off with the Music Key . Music Key is a new service that comes with the existing Google Play All Access service (and vice versa). It offers several new things like downloading videos for offline viewing, playing music in the background on a mobile device, and getting rid of YouTube ads. If you already have a Google Play All Access subscription, then you now have these features in addition to the great features you already have, and if not, it’s definitely worth thinking about for $ 9.99 a month.
Note. You can also use offline mode to watch movies and TV shows. Every time you buy a movie on YouTube, it appears in your Google Play account. Cache it to watch it offline with the Google Play Movies & TV app for Android and iPhone .
YouTube was the norm for casual use, like watching videos and songs that friends tell you about. However, if you take the initiative to create playlists, build a collection of cheap to free content, and take your music offline with Music Key, you are tapping into the real potential and convenience that YouTube has to offer, even if that just means you stop. lose videos that you really wanted to show your friends.