Page 1 of 1

Horribly stupid You Tube videos with no player names / details

Posted: May 31st, 2026, 1:30 am
by Januan
All these videos that just show the session & day
It is TOTALLY unimportant except for year and month
But far more important are the players & personalities of table tennis
It would make far more sense to add player names in the title or in description.
If I search for a player and if that player is in many videos but if their names are not searchable because their names were not in title or description of the YouTube video, that player will never show up in searches.
From the viewpoint of promoting the sport especially in small countries, this is TOTALLY useless

Re: Horribly stupid You Tube videos with no player names / details

Posted: May 31st, 2026, 1:36 am
by Urkra
If a table tennis video contains multiple matches and the player names appear only in the on-screen scoreboard graphic, YouTube's ability to find that video from a player-name search depends on whether YouTube's systems successfully extract and understand that text.

Possible scenarios:

Player names are spoken by commentators → very likely searchable because they appear in the transcript.
Player names are in the title or description → very likely searchable.
Player names appear in chapter titles → often searchable.
Player names appear only in the scoreboard overlay → maybe, but much less reliable.

YouTube has image-recognition and OCR (text recognition) capabilities, but it's not clear that all detected on-screen text is indexed for general search in the same way titles and transcripts are.

You can see evidence of this when searching for obscure matches:

Videos with the players named in the title usually rank highly.
Videos where the names only appear visually often don't appear, even when the match is in the video.

For table tennis channels that upload long tournament recordings with dozens of matches, viewers often struggle to find a specific match unless:

The uploader lists the players in the description.
Chapters are added.
Someone mentions the players in the audio.

So if you're trying to make matches discoverable, don't rely on names appearing only in the score graphic. Put the player names in the title, description, timestamps, or chapters. That is much more reliably indexed by YouTube search.