HTC has been doing some rather different stuff lately, with their announcement and launch of a couple of new devices towards the end of last year, the HTC RE Camera and the HTC Eye, both devices being more solely focused on providing users with a better mobile photography experience. The RE Camera was definitely a step in a new direction for HTC, and it already came with some intriguing functionality from the get go. Now HTC seems to be expanding on that functionality by taking a page out of Sony’s book and offering up a way to stream the video that consumers are shooting with the RE Camera straight to YouTube while live. While this availability to stream live recordings to YouTube with RE has been available on Android prior to today and since the update to the RE Android app back on January 9th, HTC is expanding its capability to iOS devices today as previously stated back in January that they would bring this function to iOS later in Q1.
This feature doesn’t seem too different than Sony’s Live On YouTube app which pairs with the rear facing camera on the back of the Xperia Z3 and other Xperia family of devices, offering up the capability to stream video live while you’re recording in up to HD and Full HD resolution quality. With the HTC RE Camera, the live YouTube streaming function is a little more limiting in the quality department as it will only let users stream video while recording in 480p. That’s quite the resolution dump down from Sony’s similar offering. In addition to the resolution limit, the HTC RE Camera live YouTube stream will only allow for streaming up to 30 minutes at a time.
Another thing to make note of is that HTC’s RE Camera and the Live Streaming to YouTube requires a data connection to either 3G or 4G LTE networks, and cannot rely simply on WiFi for streaming the videos that are being recorded. This may or may not be a hindrance to some, but this was clearly stated by HTC back when they announced the feature would be coming in a future update. It’s also important to note that any videos you stream to YouTube live will not be saved to your RE Camera’s onboard storage, but they will be uploaded to your YouTube account.