Starting Monday 21st, users will begin to see a new indicator (around the YouTube channel’s avatar) to show when a channel is live on YouTube. YouTube’s chief product officer Neal Mohan made this announcement on Twitter stating that it’s now easy “for users to find live streams on YouTube”.
As you can see in the above screenshot, there is a new (similar to what you have in the TikTok app) Live rings feature on the mobile app.
“YouTubeCreators streaming live will now have a ring around the channel avatar & clicking on the avatar will take you directly to the livestream.”
Some Social networking sites are already using this feature, which may explain why it appears to be so familiar. Whenever users are Live on TikTok, you see the same buzzing ring around their profiles’ profile pictures. This shows up on your feed. Similarly, Instagram displays a coloured ring around a user’s DP to notify other users about a live stream broadcast.
Just like ‘Stories’, introduced in the past by Snapchat and was immediately copied by virtually every platform out there, it appears that the live ring feature was too good to pass up the opportunity to be integrated into the YouTube platform. However, “Shorts,” a feature on YouTube that allows you to view short-form videos in a vertically scrolling feed, is the most obvious indication of the inspiration YouTube is getting from TikTok.
Mohan’s tweet didn’t explain whether this will roll out to both Android and iOS users. However, it’s possible YouTube will add the feature to users in batches depending on their countries and locations.
