YouTube increases video upload limit to 15 minutes

YouTube is giving everyone a chance to have their 15 minutes of online video fame. Actually, YouTube has been enabling ordinary folks to become online video stars for years - but only for 10 minutes or less.

Today, the company announced that its upload limit for video content has been increased by 5 minutes, now at 15 minutes.

The company said it has spent "significant resources" on enhancing its Content ID system and other tools for copyright owners such as movie studios, music labels and more than 1,000 other partners who use Content ID. Because of the upgrades for those partners, the technology is now powerful enough to support longer clips for non-partners.

That's a nice beef-up of the infrastructure and it could open the doors to more types of online programming. After all, in the early days of TV, the first sitcoms to build followings were 15 minutes long.

So what is the company doing to celebrate this new milestone? It's encouraging users to create a "15 minutes of fame" video and tag it with "yt15minutes" by August 4. Some of those clips will be featured on the YouTube home page in the future.