YouTube just made available a new version of Live Redirect to streamers on its platform, which now allows channels to not only send their audience from one of their streams or Premiere videos to another within their channel, but also direct their audience to another channel once they go offline.
The premiere launch event of Top Gun: Maverick utilised this Live Redirect feature, as it directs nearly 150 Paramount branded YouTube channels to the live stream of the event.
On Twitch, this action of sending audiences to another channel is called ‘raid’. By default, Twitch allows redirects or raids from anyone, a setting that can be changed but many don’t do that. This has created the issue of ‘hate raids’, where a streamer’s channel is flooded with abusive text, whether through bots or other users directed there from another channel that has an issue with the streamer.
Taking note of this, YouTube has made it less easy for its streamers to be targets of ‘hate raids’. From the start, channels can only be a target of a streamer’s Live Redirects only if it is already a subscriber of the streamer or if it explicitly allowed the streamer to do so. Also, only streamers with more than 1,000 subscribers and have no active Community Guideline strikes will be able to send Live Redirects. Channels of any size will be able to receive Live Redirects as long as they opt into it with the two previously mentioned ways.
Over on Twitch’s end, this is how the feature looks like presently:
You can watch YouTube’s Creator Insider team talk about the feature in the video below.