YouTube is finally upping its game on their app, as it will now include a mobile live streaming feature. The announcement was made during VidCon and the company has already offered the feature to a few video creators, namely the American political commentary web series "The Young Turks," Indian comedy collective AIB, Platica Polinesia, the Saccone-Joly family better known as SACCONEJOLY on YouTube, and Alex Wassabi, and will be offering it to more creators soon.
The new feature puts YouTube in a position to compete with Facebook Live and Twitter's Periscope, as well as Snapchat. YouTube still remains to be the biggest video network in the world, as per USA Today, as it has 10 billion monthly viewers, while Facebook claims to have about 8 billion views daily, and Snapchat, 10 billion.
But YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki isn't worried about the statistics. The company prefers looking at how long viewers actually watch a single video instead of how many views a particular video gets. She believes that the "right metric" is watch time, because it implies how long a user is engaged to the material he or she is waching. She adds that watch time grows 50% every year.
"Live streaming is not something that’s new for us, we're always thinking about new ways to capitalize on immersive digital video in general," YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan told Mashable. "Our belief is that YouTube—being central place of video on Internet—needs to be on the cutting edge. And we want to make it easier for our users to take advantage of these new technologies."
YouTube was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, and was bought by Google for $1.65 billion a year later. The YouTube app maintains a spot in the top 10 most downloaded app in both Apple and Google app stores.
