The Press Information Bureau’s official YouTube channel was unable to live stream International Yoga Day events on Thursday, 21 June, with the video-sharing website blocking it, Indian Express reported.
The channel has been blocked as YouTube is updating its “partner agreements”, a spokesperson of the website told PTI.
Officials said that the channel had been blocked from 15 June (Saturday) and it came to the notice of officials on 18 June when a press conference of Railway Minister Piyush Goyal which was to be streamed live failed, the PTI report added.
Because of the block, the PIB has been unable to access its own content, post videos or live telecast events, including the Yoga Day one, PTI report added.
The channel was experiencing a “technical glitch, because of which viewers are not able to access the content,” sources in PIB told PTI.
PIB has asked the technical team to find the cause of the problem and then it would decide on the future course of action, the PTI report said.
They said the issue has been communicated to YouTube India and efforts are on to “resolve” it, according to the Indian Express report.
‘This video contains content from Press Information Bureau. It is not available in your country,’ is what appears as an error message when one tries to watch a video, PTI says.
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.A spokesperson for YouTube India told Indian Express
However, PIB sources told Indian Express that they were not apprised of any communication from YouTube India about videos being blocked on account of updated partner agreements.
According to PTI, the PIB YouTube channel, which was launched in 2016, has 1,52,804 subscribers and 3560 uploaded videos.
(With inputs from PTI and Indian Express)
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