Youtube Now Equipped With Live Streaming For Mobile Users

Youtube Now Equipped With Live Streaming For Mobile Users

Google has described this new feature as “a highlighted message in the chat stream that stands out to the crowd to get more of your favorite creator’s attention”. Today, YouTube announced that it’s rolling out live video to people with 10,000 or more subscribers. That’s a tiny sliver of YouTube’s user base, but the company promises to extend live video—along with its new "Super Chat" pay-to-highlight messaging and monetization feature—to all of its users this year.

Live-streaming video will support the capabilities of standard video; this means that users can find these live videos the same way they would find any other video. These videos will also have the same copyright protection as other videos.
The functionality remains unchanged, however. As before, you can set a custom title, enable or disable live chat, and choose to send a notification to all of your subscribers. You can broadcast in portrait or landscape and messages will appear on your screen as fast-moving bubbles. 

If you've used Periscope or Facebook Live before, you'll know exactly what to expect. Why Google has taken so long to roll-out the tool is unclear; the YouTube team says it's made some adjustments, such as slowing down live chat and "pushing for better streaming quality," but otherwise it's a mystery.

According to a Variety report, viewers can pay as little as $1 to get their comment highlighted. But to get that comment bumped to the top of the chat as well, they'll need to dish out as much as $10. It seems the cost of a Super Chat comment ranges depending on the length of the comment, the highlight color, and the length of time the comment stays pinned. Viewers could drop up to $500 on a Super Chat message.

While YouTube takes 55 percent of ad revenue from creators, it has not shared how much Super Chat revenue it will take. The Super Chat support page says creators will "receive Super Chat revenue in the same way that you receive ads revenue with AdSense." Other social media sites have systems similar to Super Chat. For example, Twitch lets users pay to use special "emotes," or emojis, in the chat to "cheer" creators during a live-stream session. Those special emojis cost anywhere from $1 to over $100.