YouTube Rolls Out Mobile Live Streaming And Monetised ‘Super Chat’

If you have over 10,000 subscribers on YouTube, you’ll be able to live stream on mobile as of now. For the rest of us plebs, we’ll have to wait a little while for the new feature – but we do have immediate access to the new ‘Super Chat’ feature. Which you’ll have to pay for, and creators will earn sweet cash on the back of.

The mobile live streaming option is built into the regular YouTube mobile app, so, according to Google, all you have to do to start streaming is “open YouTube, hit the capture button, and you’re live!”

The streamed videos show up in search, can be found through recommendations or playlists, and you can protect them “from unauthorised use”. Other enhancements include slowing down live chat – “it turns out receiving 2,000 messages per second is a little too fast!”, Google says.

Now, what on Earth is Super Chat? Basically, it’s a way for viewers to get the creator’s attention among the gazillion other comments in the chat stream. For cash. Here’s the explainer from Google:

To help creators earn revenue from live streaming, we’re excited to launch Super Chat, a new live stream monetisation tool available to creators in more than 20 countries (and viewers in more than 40 countries).

Super Chat is like paying for that front-row seat in the digital age: it lets any fan watching a live stream stand out from the crowd and get a creator’s attention by purchasing chat messages that are highlighted in bright colors and stay pinned to the top of the chat window for up to five hours.

Super Chat gives viewers a chance to add a little visual flair to their chats and gives creators a new way to keep connected to their fans while earning a little money on the side, let’s say for example, while shopping at Target or playing video games 🙂


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