Creator Weekly: Apple Podcast Video, YouTube Shorts Editor, Snapseed Camera

This week I am loving watching the sliding, twirling, and swooshing in the Winter Olympics (from warm inside, of course). It’s amazing to see what the athletes can do. And I like the camera work with drones and the skating videographer for an immersive experience. But now I think I’m ready for spring.

This week there are updates for Apple Podcasts, YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn, Restream, Meta, Snapseed and more.

📨 Subscribe to get Creator Weekly by email.
👂 Listen to the Creator Weekly podcast in YouTube Music
🔴 Watch Creator Weekly Live episodes

🔴 Creator Weekly Live

Join Creator Weekly Live on Sunday, 10:30AM Pacific time (6:30PM UTC). Join me live or watch the recording.

✅ Take this week’s quiz

What do you know about Google Family Groups? Take this week’s quiz.

New Tips and Tutorials

My tech tip for this week is how to archive a single Gmail label, creating an archive for a project, trip, or sender.

To Do & Try

Google I/O: The dates for Google I/O were announced. You can register and play this year’s puzzles.

Make Music: Custom music generation is now available in the Gemini app, using the Lyria 3 generative music model. It can generate both music and lyrics, starting with a text prompt, photo or video. It will output a 30 second track with cover art generated by Nano Banana. This is also available in the YouTube Shorts Dream Track editor in the US, and rolling out to other countries (but not the European Economic Area). Google notes “Lyria 3 is designed for original expression, not for mimicking existing artists.”

Apple Podcasts Adds Video

Apple Podcasts will soon have video (“this spring”). Fans can “seamlessly switch between watching and listening to a show”, and download videos to watch offline.

Creators distribute their video through “participating hosting providers and ad networks” (video is HLS format -- Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming), and will also be able to dynamically insert video ads

Video podcasts are already available on Spotify, YouTube, and other platforms.

LinkedIn Fights Inauthentic Comments

LinkedIn is trying to keep discussions authentic. Their policy does not allow automated comments “submitted to LinkedIn via a browser extension, script or third party tool, without human action involved in clicking the comment button”.

VP of Product Management Gyanda Sachdeva notes automated comments are usually low quality. To help improve comment quality, automated comments will be removed from the “Most Relevant” section, may be removed from outside the commenter’s network, and users who continuously post low quality automated comments may have their ability to use LinkedIn restricted.

Live Stream Portrait + Landscape With Restream

Restream now lets you stream in landscape and portrait at the same time from Restream Studio on the web.

You can stream to the same YouTube channel in both formats at once, or assign different formats to different destinations (for example, Landscape on YouTube and Portrait on Instagram).

Restream Studio is “cloud powered” so there’s no extra load on your computer.

There aren’t currently customization options for the vertical stream (that layout is based on your landscape layout), but that will be coming soon.

Restream is my streaming platform of choice, so I’m looking forward to using this for vertical + landscape livestreams on YouTube. You can do that in YouTube Studio’s Live Control Room, but my experiments with that have been awkward, and there aren’t any nice layouts.

I’ll note that Restream also lets you dual stream with their OBS plugin. StreamYard has a similar feature available for paid plans.

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

In the YouTube Studio mobile app, your Shorts will be displayed in a grid, rather than as a list. If you prefer the list format, you can switch back by tapping the list view icon at top right.

In the YouTube Shorts video editor, you can now edit individual video clips in context with other elements (audio, video, visual overlays). You can make “precise adjustments and edits to the timing of each clip with zooming and snapping, rearranging or deleting clips to create a rough cut”. On Android you can split videos into segments for editing.

YouTube digital Gifts powered by Jewels (which fans can give during vertical live streams) have launched in Canada. Fans spend real money to purchase Jewels, which can be used to send a Gift to a vertical live streamer. Previously this was US only. Learn more.

YouTube is testing their conversational AI chatbot that lets you ask about videos on smart TVs.

If you’re in London: YouTube's first video belongs in a museum. Now it's in one.

In StreamYard you can now customize a ticker that appears on-screen in your live stream.

Web Publishers and Search

Google Search Console AI-powered configuration (announced in December) is now available to everyone. This lets you describe the analysis you want in natural language. The AI tool helps by applying filters, configuring comparisons, and selecting the metrics to analyze.

WordPress(dot)com now has a WordPress AI Assistant integrated with the WordPress Editor, Media Library, Block Notes and AI Website Builder. It uses your site’s content and layout to give personalized assistance with design, editing and creating new images (using Google’s Nano Banana). This requires a Business or Commerce plan.

Photos and Image Design

Snapseed the pro photo editing tool acquired by Google in 2012, has added a camera. The camera lets you choose what type of film to emulate (choose Kodak Gold, Fujifilm Superia or a number of others), and the images can be manually fine-tuned. This is available in the free iOS Snapseed app. The Android Snapseed app has not been updated since 2024.

Pomelli is an AI experiment from Google Labs to help small businesses create marketing campaigns. You can try it here. It has a new feature, Photoshoot, that lets you start with a productimage (“don’t worry about polish”), then generates professional-looking images that are “on brand”. You can even add context by using your product URL to create campaigns.

If you use Google’s NotebookLM to create slides, you can now make prompt-based revisions. You can change the image, remove a text box, and otherwise prompt changes to the slides. (This is not as good as making them actually editable, but better than nothing!)

Social Media

Mastodon.social (one of the main default Mastodon servers) has finally added a Help Center. Mastodon also has plans to improve server discovery and the onboarding process, a redesigned profile for creators, and an option for organizations to offer updates by email. At its heart their commitment is “building a social web that puts people first.”

Snapchat is launching paid Creator Subscriptions. Fans can receive exclusive content, priority replies to a creator’s public Stories and an ad-free experience. Creators set their own monthly pricing. This launches in Alpha on February 23, with select participating creators in participating markets on iOS devices.

Threads made it easier to share a post to an Instagram Story without leaving the app.

Social Media Today: Meta Looks to Sneak Through Facial ID Update

The US Midterm elections are this November, and Meta shared their plans. Fact checkers were removed last year, and were replaced by Community Notes. Community Notes only display if “contributors who usually disagree with each other” agree it should be published, which means the most partisan content will never display a Note (which I believe is the intent of the policy change). Political ads have a “paid for by” disclaimer, and AI-generated or altered realistic looking people or video of events will now be labeled “AI Info”, rather than “digitally created”.

Meta is retiring the messenger(dot)com website. You can still use facebook(dot)com/messages on the web instead.

More AI Updates and Tips

Google released Gemini 3.1 Pro, which has a “smarter, more capable baseline for complex problem-solving”. It’s available in the Gemini app and NotebookLM for AI Pro and Ultra subscribers.

404 Media reports Pinterest Is Drowning in a Sea of AI Slop and Auto-Moderation. On the one side there is a lot of low-quality AI-generated images there, and on the other side Pinterest’s automated systems label non-AI images as AI.

An AI agent wrote a hit piece on an open source project maintainer, after its submitted code was rejected, but that’s not the disturbing bit. Tech news site Ars Technica reported on this, but the article it published included fabricated quotes. The article’s author has apologized for that, saying he was sick, rushed to finish the article, and did not verify the quotes provided by ChatGPT. There’s such a rush to use generative AI tools that are known to “hallucinate”, and apparently there’s no fact checking. It does not bode well for journalism.

Prices will be going up: A 'seismic' Nvidia shift, AI chip shortages and how it's threatening to hike gadget prices

Peggy K's Creator News

Search This Blog