YouTube may be letting anyone live-stream straight from their phone

By Christian de Looper March 17, 2017

YouTube — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Want to live-stream on YouTube but don’t have the 10,000 subscribers needed to get started? Good news — that limitation is now no longer in effect.

Live-streaming was added to the Android app in February, and the only catch was that it was only available to channels that had at least 10,000 subscribers. It’s not known exactly how many subscribers you now need to have — or if there’s a requirement at all — but users with far fewer than 10,000 subscribers are noting that they can now live-stream on the YouTube app.

Some users are reporting similar changes to the iOS YouTube app, so it’s looking more and more like YouTube wants to expand live-streaming to everyone — much like Facebook and Twitter have done over the past few years.

To see if you have access to live-streaming on YouTube, open up the app and press the floating record button on the home screen. If you have access to it, you’ll then see a “Go Live” button on top of the standard button that allows you to start recording. How live-streaming works doesn’t appear to have changed at all beyond the wider availability of the feature.

The move makes sense for YouTube. Live-streaming has become extremely popular over the last few years, and companies like Facebook are leading the pack. If YouTube wants to remain competitive in the video streaming segment, then it has to keep up with the new trends — and video-streaming is one of those trends.

Google hasn’t updated its website just yet, so it still states that the minimum number of subscribers for live-streaming is 10,000. We’ll likely hear more about the changes to live-streaming in the next few days — and when we do, we’ll update this post.

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