PIB YouTube Channel

The Press Information Bureau’s official YouTube channel has been blocked as YouTube is updating its “partner agreements”.

The blocking of YouTube channel means that the PIB is unlikely to be able to live stream International Yoga Day events tomorrow.

However, PIB can live stream the event on other social media sites.

“PIB India’s YouTube channel is experiencing a technical glitch because of which viewers are not able to access the content on the channel. On trying to watch a video, an error message is getting displayed saying ‘This video contains content from Press Information Bureau. It is not available in your country’.

“The problem has been communicated to YouTube India and efforts are on to resolve the issue. It has also come to our notice that several reputed institutions in other parts of the world are also having identical problems,” a PIB source told PTI

Besides PIB’s channel, YouTube channels of MIT Open Courseware (which has north of 1.5 million subscribers), Jamendo Music, and Blender Foundation (with over 190,000 subscribers) have also been blocked.

“Videos on a limited number of sites have been blocked as we updated our partner agreements. We are working with them to get their videos back online,” the YouTube spokesperson said.

Officials said that the channel has been blocked from June 15 (Saturday) and it came to the notice of officials on June 18 when a press conference of Railway Minister Piyush Goyal which was to be streamed live failed.

Officials, however, were concerned that the glitch could impact the publicity and dissemination efforts for the Yoga Day event tomorrow.

The PIB YouTube channel, which was launched in 2016, has 1,52,804 subscribers and 3560 uploaded videos.

PIB has asked the technical team to find out the cause of the problem and then it would decide on the future course of action, said a senior official.

YouTube, as of last month, had 1.8 billion monthly logged-in viewers across its website and seven apps.

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