YouTube is many things. A revolutionary way the world now shares videos of all types, including games, songs, cooking recipes, guitar lessons, you name it. If you can dream it up, chances are you can probably find it on YouTube. One thing that YouTube is not, or at least was not, is a viable option for live streaming at 60fps, more specifically live streaming for games. That appears to be changing as 60fps live streaming support on YouTube has been announced today, and that’s likely meant to focus on live streaming at the fast paced frame rate to presumably compete with Twitch, which is the current industry leader in live streaming for games of all types, but most notably those of a competitive nature like League of Legends, Dota 2, Counter Strike GO, Starcraft 2, and more.
YouTube hasn’t officially stated that there entering into the live streaming games market, but considering they made an attempt to buy out Twitch last year only to have the deal fall through with Twitch later being picked up by Amazon, plus the nature of support for it at a frame rate which is used mainly for providing smooth game streaming playback, this is a good indicator that they’re moving forward with a plan to offer something of this nature. As of right now the live streaming at 60fps is only accessible on desktop versions of YouTube, but Google mentions that other platforms (like Android for example) will be coming out in the weeks ahead.
In addition to the announcement for 60fps live streaming, some Android users are reporting seeing support for 60fps videos showing up in their “quality” options when playing specific videos using the YouTube app on their devices. This isn’t showing up for everyone, so Gooogle is likely rolling things out in a small batch before they begin turning on the support for all users. Google also seems to have more planned for the live streaming features and will be announcing potentially in the near future, so they could very well be talking about these things at the annual Google I/O conference which comes up next week.