Creator Weekly: YouTube Auto-Dubbing Expansion, Twitch Business Managers, Google Discover Core Update

Even though the weather has been beautiful here in the Bay Area, I’m planning to spend a good bit inside watching the Winter Olympics and Super Bowl. I’m not usually a big football or skiing fan, but I can’t resist the big events.

Whether you are staying in or going out, check out this week’s updates from YouTube, Google Search, Google Vids, Facebook, X, and more.

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Sports

It’s all sports this week. The Winter Olympics began in Milan, Italy and Sunday is the Super Bowl in Santa Clara, California. The big platforms have geared up, setting the stage for creators to record related content and viewers to get an inside look at the action.

🏂Google and YouTube: Tune into the 2026 Winter Olympics with Google
🏂Meta: Watch the NBCUniversal coverage of the Winter Olympics on the Meta Quest.
🏈 Google: How Google Cloud is helping Team USA elevate their tricks with AI
🏈 YouTube: How to watch Super Bowl LX and the Super Bowl LX flag football game on YouTube
🏈 YouTube: Watch the Super Bowl ads on the Ad Blitz channel.
🏈 Twitch: Cam Skattebo, Micah Parsons, Ashton Jeanty, and more Face Off at Twitch’s Seventh Annual Streamer Bowl
🏈 Bluesky: There’s an automatic live event in Discover and Explore for NFL games and a Starter Pack of sports reporters to follow.
🏈 Apple: Apple Music kicks off Bad Bunny’s Road to Halftime ahead of Super Bowl LX
🏈 Threads: Has a booth for creators and podcasters to record content that you can find with #NFLThreads.
🏈 X: X Calls on Users To Submit Grok-Generated Video for Super Bowl Promotion

YouTube Auto-Dubbing Available to All

YouTube auto-dubbing is now more widely available:

Available to all channels (it can be turned off in your publication settings)
Real-time translation from 27 languages →English and English → 20 languages
Expressive Speech that “captures a creator’s original emotion and energy” in 8 languages (English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish)
Automatic Smart Filtering (won't dub when it shouldn't, like music or silent vlogs)
Won't harm discovery of the video in the original language, and may increase discovery in other languages.
YouTube is testing lip syncing, to match the speaker's lips more closely to the dubbed audio.

Viewers can set their preferred languages, and YouTube will default to the original audio in those languages.

More Google Vids Features

Google Vids has expanded access to more features for both personal and Google Workspace accounts. Features now available include:

read-along teleprompter
transcript trim (edit words or silences from the transcript to edit your video)
styled captions

Recent updates are making Google Vids a pretty decent free video editing tool, especially if you don’t need the premium AI-powered features.

Less Clickbait in Google Discover

The Google Search February 2026 Discover Core Update is rolling out to US users in English (it will eventually expand to all users in all languages). This is an update specifically for Discover on mobile devices (in the Google app, google.com on your Android device or by swiping right on your phone).

The update will show users more locally relevant content, less clickbait, and “more in-depth, original, and timely content from websites with expertise in a given area, based on [Google’s] systems' understanding of a site's content”.

If you want your website or blog to appear, Google recommends:

avoiding clickbait and sensationalism
using accurate page titles and headlines
including “compelling, high-quality images” (large images should be at least 1200 px wide and have max-image-preview set to large)
providing an “overall great page experience”

Twitch Channel Business Managers

Twitch has added a new Business Manager role.

A Business Manager added to your channel can access your Analytics Overview, Stream Summary, Earning Analytics and Sponsorships Portal (including the Creator Profile) to manage sponsorship opportunities on your behalf. Business Managers cannot view your Revenue/Payouts or change your payment method.

Add a Business Manager on your Creator Dashboard under Community > Roles Manager.

Other roles are Editor, Moderator, Lead Moderator, VIP and Artist. Learn more.

Adobe Backtracks on Animate Shutdown

Adobe faced a backlash when they sent an email to users announcing they would be discontinuing Adobe Animate on March 1, with access to files and project data only until March 1, 2027.

Professional animation studios use Animate for their projects, meaning they would have to quickly migrate to a different platform.

Adobe ended up having to post a clarification and apology a few days later, noting it “did not meet our standards and caused a lot of confusion within the community”. The platform is instead in maintenance mode, meaning there will be no new features, but they will not be removing access either to the software or files.

But this uncertainty is likely to give a boost to competing platforms like ToonBoom and Moho Pro.

Alphabet Posts Record Revenue

In this week’s Alphabet Q4 earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai shared some interesting stats:

First time reaching more than $400 billion in annual revenue
Search revenue increased 17%. In Search, people “engage in longer, more complex sessions” using AI Mode, and 1 in 6 queries is voice or images, rather than text.
YouTube’s annual revenue was more than $60 billion (including ads and subscriptions). YouTube is the number one “livingroom” streaming platform in the US, including a 75% increase in “podcast” viewing. There strong subscription growth, especially for YouTube Music and NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV. More than 1 million users per day use AI creation tools, and more than 20 million users per month issue the Gemini “Ask” tool.
Cloud subscription services grew 48%, “driven by demand for AI products”.
More than 325 million paid subscriptions for consumer products (including Google One and YouTube Premium).
Gemini has more than 750 million active monthly users, with increased engagement after the launch of Gemini 3.
Lowered Gemini costs by 78% “through model optimizations, efficiency and utilization improvements”.

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

TikTok U.S. is now “back to normal after a significant outage caused by winter weather took down a primary U.S. data center site operated by Oracle.” The power outage affected content posting, discovery and the real-time display of video likes and view counts. Oracle is one of the “managing investors” of the TikTok USDS Joint Venture, so it’s unlikely they will switch to a more reliable server provider.

TikTok U.S. also explained their updated privacy policy, especially how they may collect “sensitive personal information” and your location. Your personal information is only collected if you share it with TikTok. And soon there will be a new setting that lets you choose whether to opt in to share your precise location (the advantage would be seeing local creators, businesses and events). It seems reasonable to me, but it comes down to whether people trust the new ownership.

Twitch CEO Dan Clancey is hosting a new podcast “Let’s Chat”, a series “about Live Streaming and the ways that creators and their communities are shaping culture.” His first guest is NFL star Cam Skattebo. Watch or listen on YouTube.

StreamYard lets you create a custom branded welcome card for guests.

Restream now lets you share three screens at once. They note that sharing more screens increases the load on your computer, and you should stop sharing once that screen is no longer “on stage”.

Web Publishers and Search

Reminder: On February 10 Facebook will be disabling the Facebook Like Button and Facebook Comment Button for third party sites. Facebook says they will “gracefully degrade” by turning into an invisible 0x0 pixel element, which should not break your website. But it’s probably better to remove the plugin code from your site.

Google says Googlebot (its web crawler) only crawls the first 2MB of a supported file type, and the first 64MB of a PDF file. From a rendering perspective, each resource referenced in the HTML (such as CSS and JavaScript) is fetched separately, and each resource fetch is bound by the same file size limit that applies to other files (except PDF files). For context, 90% of web pages are less than 151 kb, so this should not be an issue for most websites. Google’s John Muller says “If you want to publish a novel, make it a PDF.”

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer plugin is now available on WordPress.org. This was created as a collaboration between the Internet Archive and Automattic. It scans posts for outbound links and creates an archive page if one isn’t available, and when a linked page goes offline, it creates a redirect to the archived version.

Social Media

Social Media posting platform Fedica now includes LinkedIn analytics, in addition to X, Threads, Instagram, TikTok, Mastodon and Pixelfed analytics. The platform also supports posting to Bluesky, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr and YouTube.

Meta is making it easier for “brands to discover, evaluate and connect with creators for partnership ads campaigns using Instagram’s Creator Marketplace.” There is a new homepage, which is expanding to businesses globally. Businesses will see creators that tagged their brand or expressed interest in partnering, and be able to search for similar creators to a specific creator.

Instagram posted “tips and tricks” for finding the best stickers to use on your Stories, Reels and Posts.

You can now customize your Substack page with a custom theme, including colors and branding. This is now available in the iOS Substack app. The app also now shows your subscribed substacks at the top of the screen, with a focus on those with new posts. This seems yet another feature to keep subscribers in the Substack app.

X awarded a million dollar prize (and big honorable mention prizes) to articles posted on the platform in January (using the long-form article feature). Social Media Today has the rundown on the winners. Would you believe they align with X owner Elon Musk's pet topics?

X has added the option to include images in polls.

X announced the new Grok Imagine 1.0 AI video generation model, with 720p resolution, 10 second video, and improved audio. It is available at grok.com/imagine (although that page wouldn’t load for me).

Communication and Collaboration

Automatic speech translation in Google Meet is now available to Google Workspace Business and Enterprise (Standard and Plus) accounts, and personal accounts with a Google AI Pro or Ultra subscription. It can translate between English and Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and Italian in real time, but only one language pair can be active at a time. It’s currently desktop only. Per-user limits apply.

Gemini can help “proofread” your Gmail emails, making suggestions to make it more concise, use active voice, improve sentence structure and word choice. (Although be sure not to blindly approve every suggestion, lest your writing seem bot-like). This was previously limited to AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, but now is available to all Workspace Business and Enterprise accounts, plus personal accounts with a Workspace Individual or Google AI Plus, Pro, or Ultra subscription.

Google Workspace organizations can now add on a AI Expanded Access subscription, giving higher access to Google’s AI features, including advanced image and video generation, Gemini, NotebookLM, Workspace Studio and Google Meet speech translation.

More AI Updates and Tips

Use the Canva plugin for ChatGPT to create and edit designs inside the chat. You can edit text across entire designs (like slide deck) with a text prompt (like changing the writing style or translating). It also includes Brand Kit integration, so a “marketer can draft a campaign social post or presentation slide in ChatGPT and know it’s on-brand by default”. This is in addition to previously launched research tools. This is rolling out to ChatGPT users with Canva Free, Plus and Pro subscriptions, outside the EU.

Adobe Firefly now offers unlimited image and video generations with Firefly and other image models, including Google Nano Banana Pro, GPT Image Generation, and Runway Gen-4 Image. This is included with Firefly Pro, Firefly Premium and other plans. “Sign up before March 16 and get unlimited image and Firefly video generations up to 2K resolution in the Adobe Firefly app.”

The latest version of Firefox will have new settings where you can block current and future generative AI features. Current features include automatic translations, alt text in PDFs, AI-enhanced tab grouping, link previews and AI chatbot in the sidebar. It sounds like these are opt out, rather than opt in.

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