Skip to main content

Look out, Facebook! YouTube finally lets you live-stream videos

youtube mobile live streaming stream
Image used with permission by copyright holder
YouTube took to VidCon today to announce that live-streaming is coming to its mobile apps and will be available to all users.

Google’s video platform detailed all the new video formats it was pursuing, including 360-degree videos and VR. During the keynote, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki stated that the platform contains the most 360-degree video content on the web. She added that YouTube was also pairing its biggest creators with VR companies to produce new content.

The most exciting news for general users, however, was the live-streaming update for the YouTube app. After claiming that YouTube was investing heavily in the format, Wojcicki gave the VidCon stage to Kurt Wilms, product lead of immersive experiences at YouTube, to show off the new feature.

As Wilms opened up the YouTube app, the screen behind him projected the live-streaming function. In terms of its UI, the design matches Periscope, in that it shows you live interactions in the form of speech bubbles that mount up on the left-hand side of the display. Other live-streaming icons include a viewer count, a “like” count, and a button that lets you switch between the front and rear cameras on your smartphone. As Wilms demonstrated, you can also take a photo beforehand as a title banner for your broadcast.

“I’m really looking forward to seeing how everybody here uses these creative tools,” Wojcicki said during the keynote. The live-streaming capability is currently exclusively available to a small selection of YouTube’s biggest creators, including The Young Turks, AIB, and Alex Wassabi, among others. It will be rolled out to general users soon, although YouTube did not reveal a specific date.

The update sees YouTube play catch-up with the likes of Twitter’s Periscope, and Facebook Live. The latter has been dominating the headlines of late, thanks to its spending spree to attract notable talent (including celebs and media companies) to its burgeoning feature. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has even been doing his own fair share of legwork to promote Live, including a series of broadcasts from Facebook HQ.

YouTube, in its own words, boasts that it has a better infrastructure in place than its competitors to take advantage of live-streaming. The Google-owned video platform undeniably has an existing hotbed of popular creators, which it is also promoting through its subscription service YouTube Red, that can help spread the word on the update to its millions of subscribers. It is also already home to the biggest media companies that will likely utilize live-streaming in order to reach YouTube’s audience of 1 billion users, who watch an average of 40 minutes of videos per day on mobile devices. Engagement is evidently not an issue for the platform.

The announcement heralds the arrival of a new heavyweight contender in the live-streaming arena. One that could potentially land a knockout blow to its rivals, Twitter and Facebook.

Editors' Recommendations

Saqib Shah
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Saqib Shah is a Twitter addict and film fan with an obsessive interest in pop culture trends. In his spare time he can be…
YouTube TV adds Magnolia Network and other FAST channels
YouTube TV on Apple TV.

YouTube TV has added a handful of channels of the FAST variety — that is, the sort of thing you'd find on an ad-supported service like Tubi or The Roku Channel. The additions are hardly the only FAST channels on the largest live-streaming service in the U.S., which has more than 5 million subscribers as of June 2022.

New to YouTube TV are Magnolia Network, Charge!, TBD TV, and T2. The CW also makes an appearance in the list of new channels after a new deal was reached earlier this spring.

Read more
YouTube Stories are going away starting June 26
The Digital Trends YouTube channel on an iPhone.

YouTube today announced that it's going to kill off its Story feature — like the similarly named Instagram Stories, basically its answer to Snapchat — starting June 26. That's the last day you'll be able to post a new YouTube Story. And seven days after that, any story that already was live will die an unceremonious death.

That doesn't mean there won't be an alternative to a full-blown YouTube video or a smaller YouTube Short. (Which is, in and of itself, YouTube's answer to Tiktok.) YouTube is pointing creators to "YouTube Community posts" instead, which it says "are a great choice if you want to share lightweight updates, start conversations, or promote your YouTube content to your audience." Community posts essentially are ephemeral updates that also allow for text, polls, quizzes, filters, and stickers.  It added that "amongst creators who use both posts and Stories, posts on average drive many times more comments and likes compared to Stories."

Read more
YouTube TV details fixes for audio sync, better 1080p quality
YouTube TV on Apple TV.

YouTube TV — the most popular live-streaming service service in the U.S. with more than 5 million subscribers — this week gave an update on Reddit on some bug squashing and upcoming features, plus some welcome improvements. It's an interesting bit of transparency in an age in which app changelogs are all but useless.

Probably the most interesting is that YouTube TV is "testing transcoding changes, including a bit rate increase for live 1080p content." Resolution — that's the 1080p number — is just one part of what makes up the quality of the picture on your screen. Bit rate is another. Basically it refers to the amount of data being pushed to make up that resolution — like the difference between a 1,080-piece puzzle with a picture made up of five colors, or one made up of 500 colors. Think of it like that. The higher the bit rate, the better the picture. And as we've discussed before, we'll take a 1080p stream with a higher bit rate over a bad 4K stream any day of the week, particularly when it comes to sports (which is exactly what we've seen with Apple's excellent MLS streams).

Read more