If you’re into watching Live streams on YouTube, you’ll be excited to hear about these new viewer-friendly features.
Yesterday, the video-sharing platform launched new features aimed at connecting YouTubers with live audiences. Creators streaming from their smartphones will now get a geotag for the area where they’re recording, and viewers will now have the ability to search streams by location.
Chat replay has also been introduced. Viewers watching saved livestreams will be able to see chat comments when re-watching the video. And that’s not all.
According to The Next Web, YouTube is also bringing in “its auto-generated captions to streams, which means you’ll probably see more than a few screenshots of streams with humorously inaccurate captions”.
But the most interesting new feature is the connection of YouTube Live Super Chats. These are highlighted chat messages that viewers pay to be “pinned” to the top of the chat for up to five hours, giving their message more airtime. This feature can now be tied into to IFTTT and smart home gadgets.
YouTube will also now provide automatic English captions to live streams where they aren’t provided. The idea behind this is to make live streams more accessible to all viewers around the world. Tech news website The Verge says these captions utilize the company’s live automatic speech recognition (LASR) technology, which is “approaching” industry standards for error rates and latency.
The video-sharing platform is obviously working hard to bring creators and community members closer together, by attracting more viewers to its Live stream feature. And more Live stream viewers = more interaction and higher rates of engagement for a creator and their channel.
Expect to see more YouTubers jump on the live stream bandwagon in the near future…
Do you use YouTube’s Live stream? What are your thoughts on the new features? Let us know in the comments below…