YouTube has big plans to get its video app more involved in the flourishing world of live-streams, where rivals at Facebook and Twitter have made a splash with similar offerings.
Operators of YouTube channels with more than 10,000 subscribers will be the first to get the opportunity to broadcast live from their smartphones, Google’s video platform has announced. The feature is integrated directly into the YouTube app.
Despite YouTube being slow to the latest mobile livestreaming trend, the responsible manager Kurt Wilms stresses that the platform has been broadcasting live videos from desktop computers since 2011.
YouTube has big plans to get its video app more involved in the flourishing world of live-streams, where rivals at Facebook and Twitter have made a splash with similar offerings. (File photo, 09/12/2014. Please credit: ” / dpa”.)
More recently, Twitter service Periscope and Facebook have garnered major attention with livestreams from smartphones.
The new feature has already been tested by several hundreds of YouTubers for about half a year. “Now, it will be several hundreds of thousands,” says Wilms.
The livestreams are to be integrated into the general YouTube platform and will also be visible in a separate area.
Meanwhile the previously announced “Super Chat,” currently being introduced as a regular feature, will allow users to secure themselves a top spot in the comments section of a video for up to five hours – provided they are willing to shell out some money for it.
-dpa
