Live streaming is a huge trend this year. It might have been brought to our attention by Meerkat at SXSW last year, but live streaming has effectively been brought to the masses by Twitter’s Periscope and Facebook Live. Now, it seems that Google wants a piece of the pie, and is building its owns live streaming app for consumers.
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Live streaming is too much of a powerful tool to go unnoticed – or unused. According to a recent article by VentureBeat, Google is “building a new livestreaming app called YouTube Connect”. The idea here of course, is to dynamically enter the space that Facebook Live and Twitter‘s Periscope currently occupy very comfortably. And after Meerkat’s demise recently, the competition is effectively just the two other big players. According to VentureBeat, the new app will be made available on both iOS and Android.
So, what do you know about YouTube Connect? Well, as Ken Yeung explains, it
[quote]has much of the same functionality that you’d already find with Periscope and Facebook Live… You can log into the app using your Google or YouTube account and immediately begin streaming from your mobile phone. There are chat and tagging features, and a “news feed” that features the latest clips from your friends or those that you’ve subscribed to on YouTube.[/quote]
You will be able to watch videos live in the app itself or on someone’s channel on the desktop version of the site. Also, just like Facebook Live, users will be able to save their broadcasts after finishing a live stream. Hence, there will be replays, just like on Facebook or Periscope. Finally, there doesn’t seem to be integration with other social networks to share your stream on these.
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Let’s not forget though, that Google isn’t exactly late to the party. Live streaming is available on YouTube’s Creator Studio. It’s just not that user-friendly.
Featured image credits: VentureBeat