Mobile Live Stream Option Now Available To YouTube Channels With 1,000 Or More Subscribers

In March, YouTube started to allow YouTube channels with 10,000 or more subscribers to run live streams from mobile devices. On Saturday, the company updated its live stream support page to reflect that any verified YouTube Channel with at least 1,000 subscribers will be able to run live streams from mobile.

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Before March, YouTube allowed every channel to live-stream, but from desktop only. The video-streaming site’s change of policies reflects how it has been slowly facing competition from social networking sites, many of which now come with live-streaming features. The leading one among these is Snapchat, whose model allows users to post short, disappearing videos.

If you want to use YouTube live streams from your phone, you will need the following:

• A smartphone with at least Android 6.0 OS or iOS 8.0
• A verified channel
• No live stream restrictions from the previous 90 days
• At least 1,000 subscribers

To check if the feature is enabled, you need to press the floating record button on the YouTube home screen. You will see a “Go Live” option along with the standard record button. You can start live-streaming by clicking on it.

While YouTube hasn’t made a formal announcement about the policy change, it seems to be ramping up to allow more people to use the live-streaming feature. The reason for the gradual rollout could be that the company might have wanted to see how live streams can be accommodated with its strict video policies. Other platforms such as Facebook have faced problems with live videos in the past since ensuring video content moderation on live streams is nearly impossible with available technology.

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YouTube still remains popular for video watching, and while other platforms such as Netflix are catching up, recent data suggests they still lag in terms of number of hours watched per day.