Youtube Rivals Facebook, Launches Mobile Livestreaming
YouTube, the world’s biggest video hosting service, has rolled out a new mobile live streaming feature on its platform as it seeks to rival Facebook and Twitter in the live-streaming space.
The live stream service becomes automatically available for any content creator with subscriber numbers at 10,000 and above through the YouTube mobile app, TechCrunch reports.
The Google-owned platform said creators with fewer than 10,000 subscribers will eventually get the feature in the coming weeks.
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“It’s a launch that’ll put the power of live streaming in the hands of hundreds of thousands of talented creators, giving them a more intimate and spontaneous way to share their thoughts, lives, and creativity,” the company’s Product Managers Barbara Macdonald and Kurt Wilms, said in a blogpost.
“And we’ve been working hand-in-hand with hundreds of creators to refine the mobile streaming experience while they stream from a boat or take live calls from their fans.”
The company promised that the videos will have the same features as other YouTube videos.
Aside from that, the post also announced that the video-sharing platform added a financial incentive in the form of a “Super Chat” tool that lets online video stars make money from fans willing to pay to “stand out from the crowd” by having their chat messages highlighted in bright colors and pinned to the top of text conversation boxes for creators to see. It will also be the main source of income for content creators when doing live stream video.
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“To help creators earn revenue from live streaming, we’re also excited to launch Super Chat, a new live stream monetization tool available to creators in more than 20 countries (and viewers in more than 40 countries),” the blog post reads.
“Super Chat is like paying for that front-row seat in the digital age: it lets any fan watching a live stream stand out from the crowd and get a creator’s attention by purchasing chat messages that are highlighted in bright colors and stay pinned to the top of the chat window for up to five hours.”
YouTube announced plans to roll out the live feature in June last year. Facebook started supporting Live Streaming in 2015, while Twitter rolled out theirs in December 2016.
