After learning about YouTube Premieres from Peggy K recently I had the opportunity to give it a try last night.

After learning about YouTube Premieres from Peggy K recently I had the opportunity to give it a try last night. My YouTube channel mostly consists of live webcasts I do monthly on YouTube Live using the Hangouts on Air interface. 3-4 times a year I travel and cover an event somewhere and shoot the video to bring back and edit for my channel.

Such was the case for my latest video which I uploaded yesterday. This is a loooong video (over 2 hours). It uploaded in about 2 1/2 hours then took about 45 minutes to process (not bad). I found that I could access Cards and End Screens at that point but couldn't make them work. I scheduled my Premiere for about 1 /12 hours later and set about promoting to FB, G+, Twitter etc. When the time came around I was already chatting with my viewers and we watched the 2 minute countdown commence. Cool! Then the red "Premiere" button lit up at the bottom of the screen and away we went. The one major snafu was evident immediately.

Though the video was fully processed according to YT it was only available at 360p resolution! This was a huge disappointment to me (and a bit embarrassing) as the video was uploaded at 1080p. I apologized on the chat and said I hoped it would update during the Premiere to a higher res but this never happened. No one seemed to mind and the interaction with more than 70 viewers was really fun.

So the warning I would give those attempting this is to give plenty of time for full processing before scheduling your Premiere. There is no indication from YT that this will happen and you can't even preview your own video until it premieres to everyone. It took at least 4-5 hours for my video to begin to appear at full resolution.

All in all a positive experience which I will attempt again.