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News and Events

Updates to YouTube Live streaming

By Kurt Wilms

Group Product Manager

Together, we've experienced the biggest music, sports, science, culture and gaming events unfold live on YouTube. Now we’re introducing more ways to watch live videos and interact with your community in real time.

Catching up on the latest

Live chat plays a key role in creating connections between creators and their community. Today we are starting to roll out chat replay to YouTube, so you can follow the conversation even after a live stream is over. Live chat replays will show up alongside the video, exactly as it appeared live.

Making live streams more accessible

We launched automatic captions back in 2009, and since then, we’ve auto-captioned a staggering 1 billion videos. We’re now bringing English automatic captions to live streams.

YouTube Creator Rocky Nash with English automatic captions

When professionally provided captions aren’t available, our new live automatic captions provide creators a quick and inexpensive way to make live streams accessible to more people. With our live automatic speech recognition (LASR) technology, you’ll get captions with error rates and latency approaching industry standards. We'll roll this out in the coming weeks, and will continue to improve accuracy and latency of automatic captions.

More fun features for live streamers

Creators can now add a location tag to their mobile live streams and video uploads and share all their favorite hot spots with viewers. You can explore other videos with the same location tag by simply clicking on it. You can also use the location filter on the search results page to find other videos from a specific spot.

Last year, we introduced a way for Super Chats to trigger real life events. Now creators can set this up for their channels using IFTTT (If This, Then That). Over 600 internet-connected services and devices (like lights, pet feeders and confetti cannons!) can be connected to Super Chat. Super Chat is already available on desktop and Android devices, with support for iOS devices rolling out starting today.

With live streams, you’ve found more intimate and spontaneous ways to share your thoughts, lives, and creativity. Take these features for a spin and show us your world!


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