Streaming content is an increasingly popular avenue for brand marketers to engage with a new generation of mobile-savvy users. This excitement around live streaming may explain the growing popularity of platforms such as YouTube Live and Facebook Live.
For the former, Google announced that it has added new features to YouTube’s live streaming capability that it says will make live streams more accessible by helping users to search, interact with, and watch live videos on the platform.
For a start, a new chat replay feature makes it possible for followers to follow the conversation even after a live streaming session has ended. This offers greater value for content creators to retain the effort that went into the live streaming session, while viewers late to the session still get to experience the content.
And to make automatic captions accessible to more people than ever, the feature will now be available for the first time on live streams, albeit only in English for now. This is an important feature in a world where more consumers than ever are watching live streams on mobile devices on the go, and may not have earphones plugged in.
With error rates and latency approaching “industry standards”, Google says the technology gives content creators a quick and inexpensive way to increase accessibility of live streams where professional captions are not available. This feature will be rolled out in the “coming weeks”.
Elsewhere, a location filter has been added on search results page to help users discover more videos based on locations.
Brands looking to live stream for the first time can have it enabled in 24 hours or less, according to Google. Once enabled, live streams go out instantly, and can be streamed from a laptop or desktop computer with nothing more than a webcam and the Chrome web browser installed.