Celebrating YouTube Live’s first birthday

To celebrate the first birthday of YouTube Live, we went through the normal birthday thought process: rent a bouncy castle or bring in the magicians. Neither of these seemed just right to celebrate the millions of you who’ve seen live videos, so we went with our favorite gifts: new features from our tireless engineers.

If you have YouTube Live, here’s what you’ll see:

Wirecast for YouTube Live: This new software is free for YouTube partners and allows you to produce and stream professional-looking live events directly to YouTube from your desktop. It allows capture and switching between multiple video and audio sources, roll in of media files and images and add live effects and overlays. If you’re enabled for livestreaming, you’ll see a link to download Wirecast for YouTube in your YouTube account.

New publishing flows and real time analytics: You now have a guided flow to set up and preview live events before you go live. You can also see real time access to data like playbacks and concurrent viewers of your live streams by geography and format.

Monetize live streams: You can now monetize your live events with advertising or paid options. A live event can be claimed in the new video manager like any other video and monetized with instream ads or paid options where you can set price by country. You can see more details on this in our Help Center on ads and paid livestreaming sections.

If you’re one of the many people who’ve asked for YouTube Live but don’t have access yet, we want to thank you very much for your patience. We’ve developed these features with the expectation many more of you will eventually use YouTube Live, and like we said last year, this process takes time to roll out broadly.

Learn more about YouTube Live in the Help Center and check out youtube.com/live for everything happening right now.