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Creator Weekly: YouTube is the new TV, Adobe Firefly Video, Enhanced Safety Mode

Creator Weekly: YouTube is the new TV, Adobe Firefly Video, Enhanced Safety Mode

Peggy K
February 15, 2025

Dear readers, I ❤ you all. Happy Valentine’s Weekend!

This week YouTube says it’s the new television, there are new text-to-video AI models to try, TikTok’s back in the US app stores, there’s a new open source platform for online safety tools, you can register a domain for 100 years, Google Chat and Docs have new features and more.

Top news and updates this week

Celebrate Valentine’s day by giving Gifts to YouTube live streamers or sharing your Twitch clips.
YouTube declared it’s the new television. They are the epicenter of culture and are creating businesses in Hollywood.
Turn on the Enhanced Safe Browsing mode in Chrome to protect your YouTube channel and Google Account.
The TikTok App once again can be installed from the Google Play Store or Apple App Store in the US.
Adobe Released their Firefly AI Video model with advanced text-to-video tools, plus translation and dubbing, all trained on “properly licensed content.”
The YouTube Shorts Dream Screen tool now uses Google’s Veo2 video model.
Vimeo shut down Livestream, which it acquired in 2017.
Instagram will be using the soon-to-be released Edits app to test new features for incorporation into Instagram’s video editing tools.
Instagram is testing a comment “dislike” button, to possibly influence comment ranking.
Discord now lets you “Ignore” someone, which prevents you from seeing their messages and other activity, but doesn’t let that person know.
Kick updated their Community Guidelines for clarity and to better explain moderation.
WordPress(dot)com launched 100 year domain registrations, to go along with its 100 year hosting offering.
Roost is a new non-profit that will provide tools to organizations for online moderation.
Buzzfeed says it’s launching an anti-SNARF social media platform. You’ll have to read about what SNARF means.
Tumblr will be able to federate once it’s migrated to WordPress infrastructure (with no word when that will be).
Mastodon will be implementing Quote Posts, and is trying to do that thoughtfully.
Google explained why Google Calendar removed “cultural moments” in 2024.
Google Chat has a new Board tab in Spaces, lets you name your group conversations and a built-in poll app.
Google Docs lets you add a cover image from more sources.
Google Whisk is available in 100 more countries.
Google One AI Premium now includes NotebookLM Plus, and offers a student discount.
Plus register for Google I/O, watch Apple TV on Android, and more.

Ten Years Ago This Week

To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing highlights from 2015.

When Google Maps turned 10 in 2015, it was a solid service, with a bunch of useful features on the horizon. Since then, the Local Guides program launched and it’s gotten harder to embed maps on your own site. Take a look at Google Maps over the past decade.

What’s next? A small hint: it’s all about communication. Join me live on Sunday or you’ll have to wait for next week’s installment.

Creator Weekly Live 🔴
What do you think about this week’s updates? Join the live Creator Weekly on Sunday, 10:30AM Pacific time (6:30PM UTC).

Take this week’s quiz ✅
What do you know?

New Tips and Tutorials

This week’s tutorial: Create a form that only event invitees can respond to. (That’s a Short. Get written instructions.)

To Do & Try

If you are watching vertical live streams via the YouTube Shorts feed, and you are in the US, you can give Valentine’s Day Gifts (to do that you need to buy Jewels to pay for the Gifts). If you are a monetizing creator, set up Gifts so your fans can give you a token of their appreciation.

Twitch wants you to share the love for Valentine’s Day. You can unlock the Share the Love badge by downloading, exporting or sharing a link to a Clip between February 14 and 28. Start from your Twitch Clips manager. There are also special limited-time emotes “celebrating love and friendship.”

Pexels, the stock image site owned by Canva, is looking for photos and videos that “showcase your creative rituals and workspaces.” Submit entries by February 28 to be entered into a contest to win Canva Pro for a year.

YouTube takes on old media for 2025

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan shared YouTube’s “big bets” for the coming year. They highlight how YouTube is taking over most entertainment media, from music to TV to radio (by which I mean podcasts).

YouTube remains the “epicenter of culture” for music, Shorts, episodic content, live streams and podcasts. Yes, that covers most entertainment other than full length feature films.
YouTubers are “becoming the startups of Hollywood”, building businesses and even their own studios.
“YouTube is the new television”. TVs are the primary device for viewing for US viewers. Mohan writes “the "new" television doesn’t look like the "old" television. It’s interactive and includes things like Shorts (yes, people watch them on TVs), podcasts, and live streams, right alongside the sports, sitcoms and talk shows people already love.”
And, finally, AI (of course). AI makes it easier to create, including Dream Screen (images and short video clips) and Dream Track (music), the Imagine brainstorming tool and automatic dubbing into other languages.

Keep your YouTube Channel and Google Account Safe with Enhanced Protection

Google is recommending turning on Enhanced Protection in Chrome. If you have visited your YouTube Studio dashboard recently, you have probably seen a notice about it (I even got a push notification).

What does it do?

“If you turn on Enhanced Protection, much of the additional protection you receive comes from advanced AI and machine learning models designed to spot dangerous URLs engaging in known phishing, social engineering and scam techniques.”

That means you are less likely to open a malicious site, and that means your account is less likely to be hijacked.

Learn how to turn on the Enhanced Protection mode of Safe Browsing in Chrome.

If your YouTube account was hijacked, YouTube has assistance starting in the help center. Often hijacked accounts can be restored, but not always. It’s much better to do everything you can to keep your account safe.

The TikTok App is Back in the US

If you are in the US, and you need to install TikTok on your mobile device, it’s now available for installation again from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

The app was removed from both when the TikTok ban went into effect in the US on January 19th. It was only restored February 13th after the new Attorney General provided legal assurance neither company would be prosecuted.

Before the app was made available again TikTok started offering the Android app from a dedicated download page (www.tiktok.com/download).

Adobe Releases AI Video Model

Adobe released their Firefly Video Model for text to video.

“Firefly is great at generating dynamic landscapes, from sweeping natural vistas to detailed urban environments. The model also demonstrates remarkable capability with animal motion and behavior, atmospheric elements like weather patterns and particle effects, and mastering both 2D and 3D animation, offering new possibilities for motion design and visual storytelling.”

Key features:

Trained exclusively on “properly licensed content”. This is one of Adobe’s big selling points, that it had permission to use all the training materials (which is not something Google, OpenAI or other AI tools claim).
Has 1080p output, either horizontal or vertical.
Use advanced camera settings such as camera angle, shot angle, and motion.
Create just what you need, by adding keyframes at the start and end of the video or by converting images into video.

They also announced a few additional generative AI updates.

Adobe’s Firefly text to image generation now lets you review and refine your previous creations and use scene-to-image for 3D models.
Adobe’s new Translate Audio lets you dub audio recordings and Translate Video generates speech-to-speech translation in more than 20 languages. Plus Lip Sync is available to enterprise customers.
There are two new paid plans, Firefly Standard and Firefly Pro. Firefly Standard (with a promo price of $9.99 per month) includes generation up to 20 five-second videos or translation of up to 6 minutes of audio and video.

It isn’t cheap to use these new tools! Translate Video is similar to YouTube’s automatic dubbing, which will hopefully come to more channels in the new future, and is free.

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

The text-to-speech option in the YouTube Shorts editor is now available on iOS devices.

YouTube is integrating Google’s latest video model Veo2 into Dream Screen. Dream Screen in Shorts can generate very short background video clips. The model is “more detailed and realistic” and you can specify a style, lens or cinematic effect. Shorts with generated images or video have a SynthID watermark and label in the description. Dream Screen is available in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Vimeo is discontinuing the livestream.com platform. Vimeo acquired Livestream in 2017, and has integrated “the best of Livestream technology” into its own platform. Live broadcasting from Livestream has been shut down. Accounts will still be accessible and videos will be available through June 2025.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri shared that the new Edits video editing app (available next month) will be a test bed for new features that may eventually be incorporated into the Instagram video editor.

Streaming platform Kick explained their recent update to their Community Guidelines. The guidelines have been rewritten for clarity and moderation teams now “consider context, intent, and the creator’s reaction before making a decision.”

Nebula TV started out as a platform for “education-ish” creators who “entertain you with facts.” They have broadened their repertoire with narrative content, and now they are looking for filmmakers: “We’re looking for filmmakers with a track record of telling stories and finding an audience. People who will keep on making things with or without us, but who, with the tools in our toolbox, can begin to unlock their full potential.”

Web Publishers and Search

WordPress.com just launched 100 year domain registrations, and an updated 100 year hosting plan with trust accounts, digital security and your data mirrored in multiple locations. The cost? $2000 for 100 year domain registration and $38,000 for the hosting. But will Automattic and WordPress.com even exist a century from now?

Roost (roost.tools) is a new non-profit that is “building, open sourcing and maintaining modular building blocks for AI safety, and offering hands-on support by technical experts to enable organizations of all sizes to build and use AI responsibly.” It will offer tools for identifying CSAM and other harmful content and consoles for content moderators. It’s supported by Mozilla, Google, Discord, OpenAI, Knight Foundation, Roblox, Project Liberty Institute, Bluesky, Microsoft, Wikimedia and a number of other Partners. Casey Newton offers some perspective on how this can help smaller organizations and businesses.

Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti posted a manifesto about the flood of algorithmically-promoted SNARF (stakes, novelty, anger, retention, fear) in the media. He’s promising that Buzzfeed Studios, HuffPost and Tasty will offer “human curation of the best of the internet”. Plus they are creating “a new social media platform built specifically to spread joy and enable playful creative expression.” Yes, creative expression is AI-powered. You can sign up for early access. Victor Tangermann at Futurism sums it up: Jonah Peretti, Who Filled BuzzFeed With AI Slop, Now Says AI Is Threatening Human Agency.

Tumblr will be joining the Fediverse once the platform infrastructure has been moved to WordPress. That would allow federation with platforms like Mastodon. Automattic, parent company of Tumblr and WordPress.com, announced Tumblr’s move to WordPress on the backend in August 2024, but did not give an indication of when they expect that process to be complete.

Tumblr has been adding updates for the newish Communities, including notifying the author if a post is reblogged into a community.

Instagram is testing an anonymous comment “dislike” button. Instagram head Adam Mosseri says “this is a test, there is no dislike count, nor will anyone know if you tap the button. Eventually, we may integrate this signal into comments ranking to move disliked comments lower down. Our hope is that this might help make comments more friendly on Instagram.”

Discord has a new feature called Ignore, that hides messages and activity from selected users without alerting them. Users can tell if someone has Blocked them.

Quote Posts are coming to Mastodon. Most social platforms have the option to “quote” someone else’s post, which is basically a re-share with your own added commentary. There has been resistance to this, because it can be used to take people out of context or spur harassment. The way they plan to mitigate this is to let users turn off quote posts, or if enabled, get a notification when quoted, and be able to withdraw a post from the quoted context.

Meta reportedly told its staff that “Privacy teams will have less authority to delay product launches.” and “Product teams will have the final say over what privacy risks are acceptable”. With Meta’s less-than-great track record on privacy, that doesn’t seem ideal.

Communication and Collaboration

Features are available to free accounts unless otherwise noted.

Google provided clarification about removing cultural moments from the US Calendar (like Black History Month and Holocaust Remembrance Day). Apparently this was done in mid-2024, and was because it was too difficult to maintain across all the countries where Google Calendar is available. Reasonable? Probably. But they should have realized this would be taken as a political statement, at least in the US.

Google Chat has a useful new feature for projects: A Board tab for Spaces, where important messages and resources (documents, links, and so forth) can be pinned. The tab can be opened and closed as a separate panel as needed. Space managers can limit who can update the Space Board. This is starting to roll out now, but that may take several weeks. Learn more.

Google Chat is also rolling out the option to name group direct messages. Previously only Spaces could be named.

And Google Chat has a new built-in poll app. Create a new poll by typing “/poll” in any chat conversation and clicking enter or type @poll.

Google Docs now lets you add cover images from more sources, including searching the web, uploading from Drive or Google Photos, pasting a URL, in addition to choosing from a stock image or uploading from your computer. How to add a cover image to your Doc document.

You can now pin a conversation in Google Groups.

More AI Updates and Tips

NotebookLM Plus is now available with the Google One AI Premium subscription.

US students that are at least 18 years old can now get one year of Google One AI Premium at a 50% discount. This is only available for personal Google Accounts, not school accounts.

Google’s Whisk image generator (labs.google/whisk) is available in 100 more countries (but not in the EU or UK).

Google’s Gemini Advanced will now be able to “recall past chats to provide more helpful responses.”

Jeron Schneider at PetaPixel argues that photos should be labeled when they are entirely authentic, not only when they are AI edited.