Q&A for How to Watch Private YouTube Videos

The videos might have felt embarrassing to them, even though they contained nothing sensitive or personally identifying. Other reasons could be: they can't decide what the title and/or description of the videos should be; they can't decide if they should keep the videos or not; the videos contained copyrighted music; they might have even been shamed or bullied over them; they might have decided the videos don't suit their channel's theme anymore and are giving their channel a makeover, but they don't want to outright delete them in case they want to watch them again.

You can't unless the uploader gave you special access to it via email, or if you remember the channel name when that video was public before being changed to private. When a private video is embedded or shared to another website, or in a public playlist, people who don't have special access to it will just see a blank photo with the title saying "Private Video" with no channel name revealed, and clicking on the link will just show a message saying "Video unavailable, this video is private" with no details about the video at all. If you commented on the video before it was changed to private, you can go to your History tab and click "comments," and your comment could give you a hint.

Many private videos can reveal personal information that the uploader doesn't want everyone to see, such as the street they live on, what school they go to, and people they know such as their family, friends, classmates, and teachers. Private videos can also harbor sensitive content like sexually embarrassing videos of the uploader or other people, or secret recordings of people arguing or having private conversations. A video might also be temporarily private until the uploader is finished working on it, at which point they might change it to public.

The video won't show up at all to them. Nothing on the page will show except for a blank screen saying the video is private and a link for the person to sign in. If the person signs into an account which has special access to the video, they will be able to watch it. If they don't have access to an account to which the uploader gave special access, they can't ever watch it.

Most likely either some of those videos are blocked for copyright issues or other violations, or the person recently changed them to private or unlisted, and it's taking some time for the site to update it.

Some details in a video can give away private information about people in the video, including the uploader, such as what street they live on or other details about where they live (such as a certain park or school), or something embarrassing that personally identifies whoever wants to keep it secret. For non-personal reasons, a video might be made private if the uploader is in the middle of a project and is using the private video to create it.

They're probably embarrassed about other people watching it and didn't realize that someone would find it.