YouTube Live streaming now features pay-per-view
As it celebrates its first birthday, YouTube Live starts rolling out pay-per-view streaming. But not everywhere just yet.
For some time now, YouTube Live has been thinking about how to move beyond a free, ad-based service. Now it's moving ahead with that plan.
After tests with a handful of publishers, YouTube is offering pay-per-view options to publishers on its live-streaming service. The company said that it was in the process of rolling out live streaming to its partners.
"You can now monetize your live events with advertising or paid options. A live event can be claimed in the new video manager like any other video and monetized with instream ads or paid options where you can set price by country," YouTube partner product manager Varun Talwar wrote in a blog post.
However, the company asked for patience as the service is not available throughout the entire world. Once a partner is enabled, a promotional message will appear on their channel page and a "Live Events" tab in their Video Manager.
If you're one of the many people who've asked for YouTube Live but don't have access yet, we want to thank you very much for your patience. We've developed these features with the expectation many more of you will eventually use YouTube Live, and like we said last year, this process takes time to roll out broadly.