YouTube Drops the 15-Minute Time Limit

Earlier this year, YouTube raised the time limit for uploaded videos from 10 minutes to 15. The 50 percent increase was substantial and important especially because it was the first one since the site launched.

But YouTube wasn't done yet, it is now extending the limit to, well, infinity, for select users. If you've been a good little YouTube user and haven't uploaded your favorite episode of Seinfeld or anything like that, you may be one of the lucky ones to get the time limit removed.

"Your creativity isn’t bound by a time limit, so why should your video uploads be? Back in July we raised the upload limit to 15 minutes for all users," Joshua Siegel, a Product Manager, and Doug Mayle, a Software Engineer at YouTube, wrote.

"Starting today, we’ll begin allowing selected users with a history of complying with the YouTube Community Guidelines and our copyright rules to upload videos that are longer than 15 minutes," they announced.

For the ones that have had the restrictions lifted, there will be no more limits to how long a video can last. This should prove especially handy for the budding filmmakers who have been forced to split their works of art into 10-minute pieces, or, even worse, just make them shorter.

The average YouTube user may not have the patience to watch anything longer than a couple of minutes, but that doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of people glad to see the limit gone.

"This launch has been made possible in part by the continued advances in our state-of-the-art Content ID system, as well as our other powerful tools for copyright owners. Over 1000 global partners use Content ID to manage their content on YouTube, including every major U.S. movie studio and music label," YouTube explained.

The 10-minute limit wasn't necessarily a technical one, even in 2005 storage and bandwidth weren't that expensive that the site wouldn't be able to stand it.

Rather, the limit was supposed to make it harder for people to upload full episodes of TV shows or entire movies to the site. Now that Content ID does a great job at keeping out copyrighted content from popping up illegally on YouTube, the limit isn't really needed any more.