Skip to main content

YouTube Rewind 2019 is an improvement, but fans still hate it

YouTube Rewind 2019 is here, rounding up all of the most popular videos on the platform in 2019. Among them? Music from the likes of Billie Eilish and Lil Nas X, as well as entertainment from popular creators like MrBeast and PewDiePie, and content related to Fortnite and Minecraft.

Addressing the elephant in the room, YouTube acknowledged that its hand-crafted approach to Rewind 2018 didn’t quite have the intended effect — so much so it fast became the most disliked video on the content-sharing service, dethroning Justin Bieber’s Baby, with 17 million thumbs-down.

“This year, we tried something different and looked at what you did like — a lot,” explains YouTube. “Our Rewind 2019 video compiles the top videos and creators that you liked and watched the most around the world, from the biggest games to must-watch beauty palettes and breakout stars.”

The result? A YouTube Rewind that’s based first on foremost on metrics — made up of what people liked and watched the most, and not what YouTube thinks people liked. So in a nutshell, YouTube Rewind 2019 should be a lot more relatable to the average YouTube user, because it’s statistic-driven.

Boring perquisites aside, let’s take a look at the video itself:

YouTube Rewind 2019: For the Record | #YouTubeRewind

Another failure?

But it seems YouTube wasn’t able to pull it out of the bag this time around, either. A quick glimpse at the video’s ratings on YouTube reveals that it’s had an astounding 173,000 dislikes, versus the 120,000 likes it’s amassed in the short time it has been live. Suffice it to say, it’s on a downward trajectory.

At this stage, maybe should just put the vote to its users — a bit like we do with our Readers’ Choice Awards. Sure, people would still disagree with the decisions, but it would ultimately remove YouTube itself from the crosshairs of diehard fans claiming it doesn’t understand what its customers want.

The smart thing to do would be to extract all the data, then create a poll of the top five videos for each section, putting the final choice to the voters. Or maybe even eliminating the statistics altogether and including a voting button next to each video, adding up the ballots at the end of the year.

Editors' Recommendations

Josh Levenson
Having spent half a decade writing about the latest AV, mobile and social news for some of the world’s largest…
NFL Sunday Ticket in 2023: Everything you need to know
NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV.

We're only hitting Week 2 of the 2023 NFL season, and already everything has changed. Maybe not for everyone, but certainly for folks in and around New York City. The Jets eked out a win despite losing quarterback Aaron Rogers after just four snaps. And it's arguable whether that's a more painful loss — literally, metaphorically, and spiritually — than the New York Football Giants getting shut out by Dallas in their opening game in a 40-0 walloping. Things aren't a whole lot better in Pittsburgh, which was the victim of preseason hype yet again.

That's the bad news. The good news is that we get to do it all over again this week with a dozen games up for grabs on NFL Sunday Ticket, which debuted admirably this season on YouTube and YouTube TV after decades locked away on DirecTV.

Read more
YouTube TV in 4K: Everything you need to know
YouTube TV 4K streams settings and user options.

When it comes to streaming live TV in the U.S. (or streaming any kind of video anywhere, for that matter), resolution and bit rate remain as important as ever. And you're now able to enjoy YouTube TV in 4K. Some of it, at least. And if it seems like it's taken forever for that to happen, you're not wrong.

The basic fact is that it takes a lot of bandwidth to stream video — and that's even more difficult when you're talking linear TV, (and more so still if it's a live event like sports). So it's not really that much of a surprise to learn that most live channels stream at 720p resolution — or maybe 1080p if you're lucky. (We'll leave frame rate out of the equation for a minute, but it's a thing, too, especially for sports.)

Read more
Can you buy NFL Sunday Ticket on a TV? Yes, no, and sort of
NFL Sunday Ticket on Google TV.

It's tough to hit a YouTube property lately without running into a giant banner for NFL Sunday Ticket. And for good reason — the only (legal) service that lets you watch all the Sunday NFL games has moved from DirecTV to YouTube and YouTube TV. And that means that NFL Sunday Ticket is available to a lot more people. Like, all of them.

That's a good thing. The ability to watch what you want on whatever hardware you have is important. But there's a funny little fluke when it comes to how you buy NFL Sunday Ticket. Depending on the platform you're on, you might not actually be able to purchase NFL Sunday Ticket. At least not without taking a few extra steps.

Read more