YouTube now emails you when your video is live, and will soon default all uploads to ‘private’

YouTube is rolling out a couple of updates, kicking off with email notifications for new uploads.

Now, when you log-in to YouTube you’ll see a notification that says “we’ll send you an email once your video is processed and ready to be watched,” and you can opt-out immediately.

The idea behind this update is that you don’t have to keep checking back to see if your flick is good to go. You can also opt-out of these emails at any point in the future through your settings in your YouTube account.

Also, YouTube will soon start defaulting all videos to ‘private’ viewing mode until the user gives the go-ahead to make it public. The idea here is to give users more time to finish all the tagging and titling before it’s actually pushed live.

So this feature essentially separates the uploading process from publishing. However, it’s not yet clear how exactly this will work, and whether you will still be able to hit ‘publish’ while it’s uploading to save you having to come back to it once it’s uploaded. We suspect that you will still be able to action the ‘public’ publishing of a video during the upload.

This new feature will be rolling out to all users some time next week.