YouTube Live: faster, easier and more accessible

Whether it’s solar eclipses, NBA superstars, the hottest music artists, pro gamers, creators donating to charity, or the world’s most famous giraffe, creators use live to connect with fans during the moments that matter. In turn, we are committed to making live content creation easier and more accessible. That’s why we’re excited to share some new improvements launching today.

Real-time interaction

We know how important it is to be able to immediately engage your fans during live streams. Thanks to ultra-low latency, now you can. Enabling ultra low-latency makes it possible to stream video with just a couple seconds of latency, so you’ll be able to answer fan questions and get viewer input during your “Let’s Plays” faster than ever before. It’s easy to set up and doesn’t require any special software or encoders to work.

New tools to make live chat moderation easier

Live chat messages play a key role in creating connections between you and your fans. We want to help you shape the tone of your conversations on YouTube, so we are excited to introduce new chat moderation tools:

• Inline moderation lets you quickly moderate your chat feed by simply pressing and holding the “alt/option” button on your keyboard to pause the chat feed. Once the feed is paused, you can hover over messages to remove or approve them with a single click. Don’t forget you can also delegate a moderator for your live chat, giving people you trust the ability to remove, flag or hide messages.

• Hold potentially inappropriate messages for review By opting-in, chat messages identified by our system will be held from posting on your streams, then you decide whether to approve, hide, or report them (just like you can with comments). Best part is, as you review more messages the system will get better at identifying the types of messages you want to hold for review. If you want to block certain words or phrases, you can do that too.

• Shared hidden user lists lets your moderators use the same hidden users list across comments and live chat. And in the future hides will work in both live chat and comments, regardless of where you take that action.

Stream more easily from iPhone and iPad right to the main YouTube app

Thanks to Apple’s ReplayKit, you can already live stream directly from many popular apps on YouTube Gaming. Now we’re bringing the feature to the main YouTube app so you can live stream your painting from Procreate, your race from Asphalt 8, your MOBA gameplay from Vainglory and more from any app that supports ReplayKit. You’ll also be able to use your phone’s microphone and front-facing camera to add your own video and audio commentary to the stream.

Regardless if you’re streaming your summer vacation shenanigans from your mobile phone or a battle royale of your favorite game from your desktop, we hope these new tools help you do more with YouTube live and deepen the connection with your viewers.