YouTube has released a couple of important features for its platform. The features were actually already there, either in beta or with restrictions and the company is now making them available to the greater public. While mobile live streaming has been opened up for creators that have 10,000 or above subscribers, Super Chat is now out of beta mode as well.
The features are actually very important and together, may help the company stand its ground against other prominent live streaming services like Facebook Live, Periscope and so on. Let’s take a look at them, one by one.
So first up is the live video recording feature. Live video recording directly from YouTube’s mobile application has been opened up for creators who have at least 10,000 subscribers. And since there are plenty of those on the video sharing platform, we can expect this feature to get into frequent use. So how does it work? Well, creators with 10K+ subscribers would now be able to start recording and live-streaming at the touch of a button. Once the live-streaming session is over, the video would be discoverable upon the platform, just like the other content
Live video streaming from the YouTube mobile app was first introduced around 6 months ago for a bunch of select users including Lewis of Unbox Therapy. After testing it with a limited number of users, the company is finally widening its scope by bringing it to more publishers. And YouTube is not planning to stop either. The 10,000 subscriber benchmark is temporary and the platform is likely to roll out to more users in the near future.
The platform is also slowing down the speed of messages sent over live chat.
It turns out receiving 2,000 messages per second is a little too fast.
You bet. A similar issue can be noticed with Facebook’s live videos as well, where as an audience, it sometimes gets difficult to relate to the comment that the creator is addressing during, say a Q&A session. Because by the time the person broadcasting the live video reads it, it has already been succeeded by a couple of hundred comments.
Meanwhile, YouTube is not new to live videos. The company has a robust infrastructure in place that offers support for things like 360-degree live and spatial audio. The platform broadcast things like the US elections, and attracted millions of viewers who came over to watch the presidential debates. With this feature though, the company is making a push for increasing the amount of live content available on its platform as people will now be able to simply open up the YouTube app and start broadcasting.
Next up are the Super Chats, that are being rolled out of beta. Folks creating live videos on either desktop or mobile, can now turn on Super Chat for their videos. So what will happen is this: People who love/hate the content to actually spend some money to make their voice heard amidst the chorus of live stream will now be able to do so. Simply spend some money and get your comment boosted to the top of the pile and even pinned there.
Revenue from Super Chat will be split between YouTube and the content publisher in much the same way as in Adsense. Meanwhile, users will have to moderate the chats accompanying their live-streams on their own.
This feature could also prove to be a boon for advertisers as they exploit it to pin ads to the comments feed of popular running livestreams. It is a win-win situation as the advertisers get access to a huge number of eyeballs and the publisher make more money. This should also provide more motivation to publishers for coming up with engaging live video content.
Meanwhile, it bears remembering that YouTube is a huge, huge platform. Where do you go when you think about watching that movie trailer? Or that song? Or that tutorial? Or that episode from the famous season? Exactly. The platform plays host to a billion+ pair of eyeballs everyday. With this sort of a user base and the options given to publishers for creating and monetizing new content, we can expect live videos on YouTube to become something huge, very soon.
