It looks as if Google has been building its own answer to popular Twitter application Periscope, under the YouTube brand, known simply as YouTube Connect. It’s an unsurprising development, given the popularity of Periscope, and Facebook’s move into the same space with Facebook Live.
According to Ken Yeung, of VentureBeat, the service has much the same functionality as Periscope or Facebook Live, allowing users to log in with their Google credentials and begin streaming from their mobile phones. There’s chat and tagging features, and a news feed that shows the latest clips from friends or those whom you’ve subscribed to.
Unlike other services, though, YouTube Connect videos will be viewable in the app, through the YouTube website, and thus embeddable in other content quite easily. Though social sharing isn’t built in — yet — it’s inconceivable that there won’t be some sort of easy sharing mechanism developed before the service launches.
Timeframes? There isn’t a solid answer there but a launch ahead of Google I/O has been predicted, though for my two cents, a launch at Google I/O with some YouTube celebrities showing off how they’ve used the new feature would be much more in line with Google’s past showmanship.
Will you use Google’s YouTube Connect to share live video streams? Do you use other apps (e.g. Periscope) to create or consume this kind of content? Let us know!
