Bringing Bonnaroo to you: live stream event this weekend

The forecast for the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival this weekend in Manchester, Tenn., is scattered thunderstorms, but you don’t have to worry a stitch about that (unless you’ll actually be frolicking in the 700-acre field where it takes place). That’s because starting this Friday and throughout the weekend, we’ll be live streaming directly from Bonnaroo, in partnership with Superfly Productions and powered by Ford.

The exclusive webcast will include performances from folks like Jay-Z, Tenacious D, Kings of Leon, Weezer, the Dead Weather, LCD Soundsystem, Jimmy Cliff, The Avett Brothers, Spearhead and Dave Matthews Band. YouTube’s own ukulele queen Julia Nunes kicks the whole thing off on Friday, June 11, at 12:15 p.m. (CDT) / 1:15 p.m. (EDT). Hear her talk about her journey to Bonnaroo:

Check the full schedule along with any last minute updates here, the very same place to tune in for the full webcast from Friday, June 11, through Sunday, June 13. Subscribe to the channel (www.youtube.com/bonnaroo) for the latest videos from the festival, stay tuned to our Tweets (http://twitter.com/youtube), and join the live chat via #bonnaroolive during the event.

Enjoy!

Michele Flannery, Music Community Manager, recently watched “Tighten Up.”

Release notes: Facebook Connect, real-time sharing, subscriber stats

In addition to some changes to our new video page, which we reported in a separate post, here are some things that have launched recently:

Invitation to Facebook Connect: You've been able to connect your YouTube account to your Facebook account for a while now in order to AutoShare or to find friends to subscribe to. Less known is that the YouTube homepage can show you the YouTube videos your friends are sharing on Facebook; we've kept this under the radar while we've ramped up support. But now, when you log in to your YouTube account, you'll get a prominent invitation in the Recent Activity module (see below) to connect to Facebook, which we highly recommend that you do. In fact, we hope to integrate more social networks with YouTube going forward: knowing which videos your friends are sharing on social platforms is one of the best ways to discover those clips that you, in turn, just might feel compelled to pass along. That's how we found this gem, a lovely virtual choir.

Real-time sharing: AutoShare lets you effortlessly share videos from YouTube to Twitter, Facebook or Google Reader. What you might not have known is that until recently, it took about 10 minutes for those items to get pushed out from YouTube to these platforms. Now these actions happen instantly, in real time.

Partner Program expands again: Exciting! Users in Israel and Mexico can now become members of the YouTube Partner Program (YPP). To sign up, click here.

Subscribers tab in Insight: The number of subscribers you have is an important metric for many YouTube users, as it indicates how many people love your videos so much that they want to be sure never to miss one. (Speaking of which, we commend Nigahiga, who recently hit 2 million subscribers to become YouTube's No. 1 most subscribed channel of all time. But, we digress.) Insight, YouTube's analytics tool, recently added data about the evolution of your subscriber numbers over time, broken down into new subscriptions and unsubscriptions per day. Head over to your account's Insight area to check it out.

Planning our April Fool's Day joke: What joke? :) We just wanted to see if you were reading this far.

The YouTube Team

#subsaturday: Join Us on Twitter!

In honor of great YouTube channels everywhere, we're trying to start a movement. But we can't do it without you.

Last week, we unleashed our first #subsaturday (ie, "Subscription Saturday") Tweet and over 400 of you joined us in shouting out the YouTube channels you thought were most deserving of a little extra attention. It generated some enthusiastic comments, made this news update and even poignantly touched one soul. Not bad for our little experiment.

Now we're hungry for more. Please join us this and every Saturday, and Tweet links to 1-4 of the YouTube channels you want the world to know you love. Don't forget to include the #subsaturday hashtag so we can see the full force of our effort and easily discover new channels to watch. Like the #followfriday and #musicmonday before it, we won't rest until #subsaturday is a trending topic on Twitter all day Saturday. Can we do it?

Mia Quagliarello, Community Manager, recently watched "YouTube 101: Private Sharing with Ask a Ninja."