New features for YouTube creators

It’s the most popular, widely-used video distribution platform in the world and now YouTube has unveiled some more features, including live streaming for certain accounts.

They’re a bit late to the party with this – given the existence of uStream.tv, Livestream, Justin.tv and many others – but any YouTube creator with 100 subscribers or more, and whose account is in good standing, is promised a live-streaming capability within the next few weeks.

Also improved are custom thumbnails for videos (like, duh, Vimeo’s been offering that forever); annotations that link to external stores (their example is to buy the t-shirt featured in your video, “click here”, that kind of thing); and series playlists to help push viewers from one video to the next. Quite how that differs from an ordinary playlist, we’re not entirely sure but presumably all will become clear…

YouTube has blogged about the changes at http://youtubecreator.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/investing-in-you-more-tools-to-build.html