With the rise of streaming services and the trend towards cord cutting, the way U.S. consumers are watching video is also changing. Today, over two-thirds of U.S. homes have devices that are able to stream video, according to Nielsen . In a new report out this morning, the measurement firm looked at the impact these services are having on the “connected living room” experience, noting also that Americans are now streaming nearly 8 billion hours per month on connected TV devices like Roku, Apple TV, and Amazon Fire TV.

What’s more, is that consumers ages 13 to 34 will spend twice the time streaming when watching on connected TV devices, compared with watching on the computer or mobile devices.

Specifically, Nielsen says that consumers 13 and up were streaming an average of more than an hour per day, versus 36 minutes on the computer and 24 minutes on mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets.

The firm also noted there’s an opportunity for live TV networks to better reach a younger demographic by making more of their video content available through connected TV devices.

Today, only 3 percent of live TV viewers across the top 5 TV networks are between the ages of 18 and 24 – an implication that the youngest consumers have turned away from traditional TV viewing.

Meanwhile, 8 percent of that demographic watches content through a connected device.

“This is a major opportunity for TV publishers to amplify their content that premiered on live TV and maximize their reach by extending the programming to be seen on connected devices,” Nielsen explained.

Despite the overall growth in over-the-top video streaming, linear TV still dominates, the firm notes. Traditional live TV viewing still accounts for the majority of viewers’ time, it said.

A year ago, YouTube launched its own take on Stories, with the addition of a new short-form video format called Reels. The feature, which was rebranded as “YouTube Stories” at last year’s VidCon, was initially available only to select YouTube creators. But in June, YouTube said it would expand Stories to all creators with over 10,000 subscribers later in the year. Today, it has done just that.

Now, YouTube is beginning to roll out Stories to a wider set of creators, giving them access to the new creation tools that include the ability to decorate the videos with text, stickers, filters, and more.

The feature is very much inspired by rival social apps like Snapchat and Instagram – except that,  in YouTube’s case, Stories disappear after 7 days, not 24 hours.

The idea behind YouTube Stories is to give creators any easy way to engage with their fans in between their more polished and produced videos. Today’s creators are no longer simply turning a camera on and vlogging – they’re creating professional content that requires editing and a lot of work before publication, for the most part.

Stories let YouTube’s creators engage with fans in between videos or while on the go, offering behind-the-scenes access to their creation process, updates, sneak peeks at upcoming videos, and more.

Some early adopters of the format include FashionByAlly, Colin and Samir, DR Oficial, ChannelFrederator, and Cassandra Bankson. The test group before today was small, and only included creators with over 70,000 subscribers, we understand.

Once enabled, YouTube creators can film a new Story by opening the YouTube app, tapping on the video camera icon, then selecting “Create Story.”

Also new today is the ability for fans to comment on the Stories.

Viewers can thumbs up and thumbs down comments and heart comments, as well. The same comment moderation tools that are available on YouTube’s video uploads are also available on Stories, the company says. Plus, creators can choose to respond directly to fans comments with photos or videos that the whole community can see.

During the week they’re live, YouTube Stories will show up to subscribers on the Subscriptions tab and non-subscribers on Home and in the Up Next list below videos.

Many YouTube creators point their fans to their Instagram for their short-form content and behind-the-scenes action – something that YouTube likely hopes to stem with its launch of Stories.

Today’s expansion brings Stories to a much wider group of creators than before, but YouTube hasn’t said if or when the feature will roll out to its entire user base.

The Gillmor Gang — Keith Teare, Esteban Kolsky, Frank Radice, Michael Markman, and Steve Gillmor . Recorded live Saturday November 17, 2018. Democracy saved, fiat currency, and Facebook rope-a-dope.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@kteare, @ekolsky, @fradice, @mickeleh, @stevegillmor

Liner Notes

Live chat stream

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook

The best parts of gaming are the jokes and trash talk with friends. Whether it was four-player Goldeneye or linking up PCs for Quake battles in the basement, the social element keeps video games exciting. Yet on mobile we’ve lost a lot of that, playing silently by ourselves even if we’re in a squad with friends somewhere else. Bunch wants to bring the laughter back to mobile gaming by letting you sync up with friends and video chat while you play. It already works with hits like Fortnite and Roblox, and developers of titles like Spaceteam are integrating Bunch’s SDK to inspire longer game sessions.

Bunch is like Discord for mobile, and the chance to challenge that gaming social network unicorn has attracted a $3.8 million seed round led by London Venture Partners and joined by Founders Fund, Betaworks, North Zone, Streamlined Ventures, 500 Startups and more. With Bunch already cracking the top 100 social iOS app chart, it’s planning a launch on Android. The cash will go to adding features like meeting new people to game with or sharing replays, plus ramping up user acquisition and developer partnerships.

“I and my co-founders grew up with LAN parties, playing games like Starcraft and Counter Strike – where a lot of the fun is the live banter you have with friends” Bunch co-founder and CEO Selcuk Atli tells me. “We wanted to bring this kind of experience to mobile; where players could play with friends anytime anywhere.” 

Bunch Team

Atli was a venture partner at 500 Startups after co-founding and selling two adtech companies: Manifest Commerce to Rakuten, and Boostable to Metric Collective. But before he got into startups, he co-founded a gaming magazine called Aftercala in Turkey at age 12, editing writers twice his age because “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” he tells me. Atli teamed up with Google senior mobile developer Jason Liang and a senior developer from startups like MUSE and Mox named Jordan Howlett to create Bunch.

“Over a year ago, we built our first prototype. The moment we tried it ourselves, we saw it was nothing like what we’ve experienced on our phones before” Atli tells me. The team raised a $500,000 pre-seed round and launched its app in March. “Popular mobile games are becoming live, and live games are coming to mobile devices” says David Lau-Kee, general partner at London Venture Partners. “With this massive shift happening, players need better experiences to connect with friends and play together.”

When you log on to Bunch’s iOS app you’ll see which friends are online and what they’re playing, plus a selection of games you can fire up. Bunch overlays group voice or video chat on the screen so you can strategize or satirize with up to eight pals. And if developers build in Bunch’s SDK, they can do more advanced things with video chat like pinning friends’ faces to their in-game characters. It’s a bit like OpenFeint or iOS Game Center mixed with HouseParty.

For now Bunch isn’t monetizing as it hopes to reach massive scale first, but Atli thinks they could sell expression tools like emotes, voice and video filters, and more. Growing large will require beating Discord at its own game. The social giant now has over 130 million users across PCs, consoles, and mobile. But it’s also a bit too hardcore for some of today’s casual mobile gamers, requiring you to configure your own servers. “I find that execution speed will be most critical for our success or failure” Atli says. Bunch’s sole focus on making mobile game chat as easy as possible could win it a mainstream audience seduced by Fortnite, HQ Trivia and other phenomena.

Research increasingly shows that online experiences can be isolating, and gaming is a big culprit. Hours spent playing alone can leave you feeling more exhausted than fulfilled. But through video chat, gaming can transcend the digital and become a new way to make memories with friends no matter where they are.

Facebook Lasso has a steep uphill climb ahead as it hopes to chase the musical video app it cloned, China’s TikTok (which merged with Musically). Lasso lets you overlay popular songs on 15-second clips of you lip syncing, dancing, or just being silly — kind of like Vine with a soundtrack. It’s off to a slow start since launching Friday, having failed to reach the overall app download charts as it falls from #169 to #217 on the US iOS Photo and Video App chart, according to App Annie.

Forme Facebook Lead Product Designer Brady Voss

And now one of the Lasso team’s bosses Brady Voss is leaving Facebook for a job at Netflix. He’d spent five years as a lead product designer at Facebook working on standalone apps like Hello and major feature launches like Watch, Live, 360 video, and the social network’s smart TV app. He previously designed products for TiVo and Microsoft’s XBox.

“After five life-changing years at Facebook, my last day will be this Friday, 11/16” Voss wrote on Facebook. “Following our launch of our new app, Lasso, a project I’ve been working on for a while now, the timing works well to explore what’s coming next . . . As for what’s next? I have accepted a position at Netflix in Los Gatos, California.” A Facebook spokesperson responded that “Yes, I can confirm that Brady is leaving Facebook.”

Voss added some color about joining Facebook, noting  “There was actually a discussion about whether or not I’d be a great culture fit because I wore a tie to my interviews–which is funny because we don’t believe dressing like that is what enables people to bring their best everyday. Thankfully, they saw past the common clichés–because suits and ties are not me.” As for Facebook’s troubles, he wrote that “I was even there for the big freak out moments along the way–we’ll keep them unnamed ”, which could refer to his work on Facebook Live that spawned big problems with real-time broadcasts of violence and self-harm.

While it’s reasonable for anyone to want a change of pace after five years, especially after the brutal year Facebook’s had in the press, his departure just a week after Lasso’s launch doesn’t inspire a ton of confidence in the app’s trajectory. It might have been a sensible stopping point haven gotten the app out the door, but you’d also think that if Lasso had a real shot at popularity, he’d have wanted to stick around to oversee that growth.

Lasso’s First Rodeo

TechCrunch first broke the news that Lasso was in development last month, citing Voss as one of the team’s heads. But in the meantime, the world’s highest valued private startup Bytedance managed to push its TikTok app past Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube on the download charts. It’s now at #5 on the US iOS overall charts and #1 in Photo and Video. Facebook seems to have shooed Lasso out a little prematurely before losing more ground, given it lacks many of the augmented reality features and filters found in Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok .

Facebook Lasso

TechCrunch asked the company for some more details about the Lasso roadmap. A spokesperson told me that Facebook will be evolving Lasso and adding new features with time, and may test a feature for uploading videos instead of being restricted to shooting them in-app right now. Voss’ departure post includes a “Made With Lasso” video featuring an augmented reality effect with him conjuring Facebook Like thumbs-ups out of his hand. [Update: He tells me he added this in AfterEffects, but it shows that Facebookers think AR should be part of Lasso.]

As for monetization, Facebook tells me there are no plans to show ads right now. Typically, Facebook tries to build products to have hundreds of millions of users before it potentially endangers growth by layering in revenue generators. I asked if users might be able to pay their favorite video creators with tips, and the company says that while that’s not currently available, it hopes to explore ways to allow creators to earn money in the future. Instagram said the same thing about IGTV when it launched in June, and we still haven’t heard anything on that front. Facebook likely won’t be able to lure creators to new platforms with smaller audiences than their main channels unless it’s going to let them earn money there.

If Facebook is truly serious about challenging TikTok, it may need to build closer ties between Lasso and Instagram. Facebook left its previous standalone video apps like Slingshot and Poke out to dry, eventually shuttering them after providing little cross promotion. Given the teen audience Lasso craves is already on Instagram, it will be fascinating to see if former VP of News Feed Adam Mosseri who’s now running Instagram will insert some links to Lasso. A Facebook spokesperson says that Facebook may investigate promoting Lasso on its other apps down the line.

And one final concern regarding Lasso is that Facebook isn’t doing much to prevent underage kids below 13 from getting on the app. Tweens flocked to Musically, leading to some worrisome content. 10-year-old girls in revealing clothing singing along to the scandalous lyrics of pop songs frequently populated the Musically leaderboard. That prompted me to question Musically CEO Alex Zhu on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt London 2015 about whether his app violated the Child Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) that prohibits online services from collecting photos or videos of kids under 13. He denied wrongdoing with flimsy excuses, claiming parents were always aware of what kids were doing, and stormed out of the backstage area after our talk.

So I asked Facebook how it would prevent such issues on Lasso, where all content is public and adults can follow children. A spokesperson told me that you need a Facebook or Instagram account to sign up for Lasso, and those services require people to be 13 older. But “require” isn’t exactly the right word. It asks people to state they’re of age, but doesn’t do anything to confirm that. Lasso does have a report button for flagging inappropriate content, and the company claims to be taking privacy and safety seriously.

But if the tech giants are going to build apps purposefully designed for young audiences, asking for kids to merely promise they’re old enough to join may not be sufficient.

Vimeo announced today a new feature that will allow videos to be published directly to LinkedIn. The added support is a part of the company’s “Publish to Social” feature, which already offers publishing to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and is available to paid subscribers. The expansion to LinkedIn is another example of the company’s shift in focus from being a video destination site to one that sells tools and services to professional and semi-professional video creators.

The company last year scrapped its plans for a subscription video-on-demand service, promoted its creator business lead Anjali Sud to CEO, and acquired live video streaming platform Livestream, as a part of its broader plan to serve the video creator community through services.

Earlier this year, it announced “Publish to Social,” a tool that support uploading videos to multiple sites at once, as a part of all Plus, PRO, Business, and live plans.

Now it’s adding LinkedIn to its list of supported sites, which makes it the first video platform to integrate with LinkedIn, the company says.

The move also follows Microsoft’s earlier announcement that LinkedIn would open to video uploads as part of a larger video push on its part. Last summer, LinkedIn launched a new feature that allowed users to upload videos to the site from its iOS or Android mobile app – the idea being that users could highlight their work  projects or demonstration products, for example.

With Vimeo’s integration, however, the focus is on uploading to Company Pages, where businesses may be using video in a variety of ways to connect with their customers, prospective employees, and others.

“Video has become one of the key drivers for member engagement on LinkedIn, and businesses who want to start a conversation with their audiences are increasingly turning to Company Page videos,” said Peter Roybal, principal product manager at LinkedIn, in a statement about the partnership with Vimeo. “Our new integration with Vimeo is an exciting step for anyone who wants to gain more exposure, and understand their reach to LinkedIn’s highly-engaged professional audiences,” he added.

In addition to the ability to publish to LinkedIn, Vimeo will also provide creators with analytics on the videos, including things like video viewership, engagement, and performance stats. These are available on the Vimeo dashboard, alongside the metrics for other social platforms, as well as other websites and blogs, allowing creators to compare their campaigns’ performance across various destinations.

Creators can also take advantage of Vimeo’s other marketing tools from this dashboard to further customize and monetize their content, the company says.

Using video on LinkedIn can be a big boost for businesses. According to LinkedIn’s own data, LinkedIn Company Page videos see 5x the engagement than any other type of post. And because today’s social platforms favor native uploads, the ability to push a video from Vimeo to sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in that same manner means creators are likely also expanding their reach, rather than using embeds or links.

Snapchat is launching its first Mac and Windows software that takes over your webcam and brings its augmented reality effects to other video streaming and calling services. Snap Camera can be selected as a camera output in OBS Skype, YouTube, Google Hangouts, Skype, Zoom, and more plus browser-based apps like Facebook Live so you can browse through Snapchat’s Lens Explorer to try on AR face filters. And through its easily-equipped new Twitch extension. streamers can trigger different masks with hotkeys.

You can download the Mac and Windows version of Snap Camera now. Users can us Lens Explorer to preview effects and see who made them, Star their favorites for easy access, and access a tab of your recently used Lenses.

Despite Snap Inc’s troubles following yesterday’s Q3 earnings announcement that revealed it’d lost 2 million users causing its share price to hit a new low, Snapchat Camera isn’t about stoking growth. You won’t even have to login to Snapchat to use it. Instead the goal is to drive more attention to its community AR Lens platform so more developers and creators will make their own effects. “We’re going down the path of providing more distribution channels [for Community Lens creators] and surfacing their work” Snap’s head of AR Eitan Pilipski tells me. The desktop camera could win Lens creators more attention, and Snapchat connects top the most talented ones to brands for sponsorship deals.

Strangely, Snap Camera has no interface of its own. Really, it should have a Photo Booth-style app so you can record photos and videos of yourself with your webcam and share them wherever. “We don’t want to compete in that space. We just want to bring Community Lenses to whatever apps people are using” Pilipski explains. One major app that won’t support Snap Camera is Apple’s FaceTime. Why? “I don’t know. Apple didn’t comment on that. Believe me we tried” says Pilipski.

Since there’s “not even a facility to collect the impressions” and users don’t have to login, Snap won’t be able to add Camera users to its daily active user count. With that number falling from 191 million in Q1 to 188 million in Q2 to 186 million in Q3 as it announced yesterday, Snap really does need more ways to keep people straying to Instagram Stories. It will have to hope that when video chat users see their friends or family using Snap Camera’s lenses, it will remind them to fire up Snapchat more often. And Lenses could go viral if they show in a Twitch celebrity’s stream.

The Twitch extension comes amidst more announcements at today’s TwitchCon event including the reveal of Squad Streaming and a karaoke Twitch Sings game for the service’s average of 1 million concurrent viewers and half-million daily streamers.

The Snap camera equips Twitch broadcasters with extra features. They’ll have access to game-themed lenses for League of Legends, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, World of Warcraft, and Overwatch. Viewers will see the QR Snapcode for the Lens on the screen which they can scan with Snapchat to try the mask on themselves for virality. Streamers get a button that lets viewers subscribe to them, and can set up a “bonus” lens that shows up as a thank you when someone follows them. And with hotkeys, streamers can trigger different lenses, like an angry one for when they lose a game or victory lenses for if they manage to beat all the other Fortnite addicts.

Over 250,000 Community Lenses have been submitted through Snapchat’s Lens Studio since it launched in December, and they’ve been viewed over 1 billion times. Snapchat realized it couldn’t dream up every crazy way people could use AR just in-house. Out-Lensing Instagram is critical to Snapchat’s business strategy. The more people that use Snapchat’s AR features, the more the company can charge businesses to promote Sponsored Lenses. With the user count shrinking, Snap needs to show its business is growing to salvage its share price and pull in the outside investment or acquisition it will likely need to make it to profitability. A desktop presence could not only make Snapchat more ubiquitious, but get it in front of older users and advertisers who might be a little scared of its mobile app.

Rejoice, dark mode fans. Hulu is joining YouTube and YouTube TV as the streaming video service to embrace a dark theme – something that gives video sites a more cinematic look and feel (as Netflix already knows). The company says it will begin to roll out its new “Night Mode” starting today to all users of Hulu on the web.

The theme, which can be enabled in the settings, can also help reduce eye strain and glare in low light, Hulu notes. That’s useful for those who are watching on laptops, while curled up on the sofa or bed – as many web users are today.

While Hulu has timed the launch to coincide with its offering of creepy “Huluween” content, it says the feature is a permanent addition. However, it wouldn’t yet confirm if the dark mode will expand to other Hulu platforms. Instead, the company says it will listen to user feedback to find out if that’s something people want on their other devices, like phones and tablets.

This the first time Hulu has offered a dark theme of any sort, it notes.

Dark themes have become increasingly popular with a subset of users, especially as people spend more time on their devices, reading, interacting with, and streaming content. A number of big-name apps now offer dark themes, including YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Telegram, Instapaper, Pocket, Feedly, Medium, Wikipedia, IMDb, Apple Books, Kindle, and many others.

The feature will be live on Hulu’s site at 9:30 AM PT.

The Gillmor Gang — Keith Teare, Esteban Kolsky, Frank Radice, Michael Markman, and Steve Gillmor . Recorded live Friday October 12, 2018. Smartspeaker UI, Post-Advertising micropayments, and other mythical creatures.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@kteare, @ekolsky, @fradice, @mickeleh, @stevegillmor

Liner Notes

Live chat stream

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook

Facebook today announced the global launch of Premieres, its new interactive video format that allows creators to pre-record a video for fans, then release it during a viewing window they choose, as more of a live event. The move follows YouTube’s introduction of a similar Premieres format just a few months ago. In addition, Facebook says it’s rolling out interactive video polls to more Pages, and making its Top Fans feature available to all Facebook Pages worldwide.

Like Twitch and YouTube, Facebook is focused on giving its creators a variety of tools to engage with their fans and viewers.

Specifically, these companies have found that allowing creators to delay the release of a pre-recorded video gives them the ability to build up excitement for a live viewing event among their community, which in turn, can increase the video’s viewership when it finally hits. This benefits the creators, platforms, and the advertisers alike, as they all want to reach as many people as possible.

Facebook video Premieres had been in testing for some time before today’s global launch, according to reports from earlier this year.

The idea had been largely popularized by the Amazon-owned video game streaming site, Twitch, as a way to capture the thrill associated with a live event, while also allowing the video creators to edit their video to give it more polish.

Facebook says that during testing, a number of outlets saw increased engagement through the use of the feature, including OWN, which tested with Oprah Winfrey’s SuperSoul Sunday; Sony, which announced the 10th season of India’s successful game show – Kaun Banega Crorepati (Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?); Australia’s Broadcaster Channel 7; BuzzFeed’s Unsolved; the Buffalo Bills; and creator Jimmy Zhang.

It didn’t cite specific increases as numbers, percentages, or averages, however.

The upcoming slate of Premieres also includes an extended look at Aquaman from WB, debuting exclusively on Facebook this week.

The process of creating a Premiere involves the same video uploading tools already available, including monetization tools for ad breaks and branded content.

With Premieres, the platforms can attract a wider audience for tools that had previously only been offered to live broadcasters. For example, Twitch and YouTube creators can engage fans in chat, selling them speciality badges (emotes and Super Chat badges, respectively), along the way.

Facebook is now heading into this space, as well.

Along with the launch of Premieres, it’s rolling out Top Fans to all eligible Facebook Pages. This feature, which began testing in March, highlights the creator’s most loyal fans by displaying a badge next to their name.

For the time being, Top Fans earn the badge by being active on the Page – by watching the Page’s videos, reacting, commenting or sharing its content.

It seems likely this feature will be monetized in the future, however – similar to how fans can buy badges on Twitch and YouTube to demonstrate loyalty. But Facebook hasn’t announced any plans – and in fact, claims it has no plans to do so. (We’ll see.)

Once labeled a “Top Fan,” comments will be badged on any kind of post or video, including Premieres.

Any Page with more than 10K followers can activate Top Fans by using the video template, and then opting into Top Fans badges from the Page settings.

Video polls are arriving today, too, after tests of the feature earlier this year. Testers so far included Anderson Cooper’s Full Circle; Tastemade; and gaming creator ViruSs.

Live polls are now available to all Pages through Facebook’s Live API, live publishing tool, and soon, they’ll come to on-demand video.

These moves come at a time when video is of increasing importance to the social network. A month ago, it launched its video portal Facebook Watch worldwide, as it continues its attempts to woo video creators away from YouTube and game streamers from Twitch, to its social networking platform instead.

It also recently acquired Vidpresso’s team and tools to help make videos more interactive. At the time, it reported that its Facebook Live videos had seen 3.5 billion broadcasts to date and received 6 times as many interactions as traditional videos. Those figures are key to understanding why Facebook, and its rivals, are trying to make pre-recorded videos feel as if they’re a live event.

Plex is continuing to streamline its software by shutting down features that weren’t broadly adopted or all that functional. The company says it will soon sunset a handful of options in its media player software, including Plugins, Cloud Sync, and its “Watch Later” bookmarking feature.

The move to kill off these features comes shortly after Plex announced it would soon shut down its Plex Cloud service, due to technical difficulties.

The company had originally began its life as a way for users to organize their personal media collections of photos, music, TV shows and films. But it has more recently expanded into the cord cutting market. This shift in focus has seen Plex adding features that support the ability to watch and record from live TV.

However, the change has also meant that support for things like Plex Cloud – which allowed users to stream their media from cloud storage sites like Google Drive and Dropbox – no longer take precedence.

However, Plex says that its decision to shut down this other group of features has to do more with their lack of use.

“Watch Later,” it says, was costly to maintain and hard to justify when only a small handful of folks used it, for example. Meanwhile, Cloud Sync was adopted by so few that Plex jokingly challenged any upset users to “DM us a photo of your Cloud Sync library and today’s newspaper,” to prove they actually used it.

Still, Cloud Sync’s removal is another example of Plex stepping away from supporting other cloud platforms. In this case, the feature allowed subscribers to select some content from their local media library, then sync a copy to a cloud storage provider for access when the local Plex Media Server was unavailable.

The decision to shut down Plugins seems to have given Plex the most concern, and was not taken lightly, the company says.

The Plugins feature allows users to add various channels and other third-party add-ons to their account, so they can access online content, including video, audio and other photo services. Among the most popular were plugins for services like Pandora, CNN, Vimeo, and others.

But Plex says that less than 2% of people were using Plugins, and it was built with an outdated protocol that’s difficult to support. Essentially, it’s at the point where Plex would need to rebuild the feature to keep it around, but can’t justify doing so when so little of the user base takes advantage of the option.

Plugins also make less sense for Plex’s business as it continues its push into live TV streaming, as many of the Plugins were workarounds for not being able to access TV content – like ABC, CBS, or NBC shows, for instance, or a newscast of some sort. But Plex itself bought a streaming news service, Watchup, last year and quickly added a dedicated news hub right in its app as a result. It has also added native support for podcasts, as another means of getting news and informational content.

The company explained its reasoning for all the closures in a blog post:

The Plex ecosystem is quite large, and over the years, we’ve sometimes added things that might have made sense at the time, but didn’t age well. We’ve also been incredibly reluctant to take anything away from people who may be using a given feature. Or kill support for a platform with low usage or other challenges. And while any given case might not be significant, they can add up over a decade to a death by a thousand (paper) cuts. So we set out to do some house-cleaning…

We didn’t approach the process lightly; we looked over usage numbers and took into account maintenance costs and general customer satisfaction. In some cases, we have plans for a future in which a better replacement shows up. Other things, we’re just stabbing in the chest repeatedly with a wooden stake (and hoping it’s not a zombie). But the philosophy is the same—we want to focus our finite energy on providing awesome functionality that works great and makes the folks who use it happy.

Alongside the shutdowns, Plex also added support for subtitles, which will roll out to Plex Pass Preview in the days ahead with launches on web (desktop), Xbox One, most LG TVs, Plex Media Player, Android mobile, and Android TV with iOS and Apple TV to follow.

YouTube will no longer maintain a separate app targeting gaming and live game streaming, the company announced today. The YouTube Gaming app, which first arrived in 2015, will be sunset sometime next spring as its host of features make their way over to YouTube’s main site.

Over the years, the YouTube Gaming app has been a place where YouTube experimented with features catering to game creators and viewers who like to watch live and recorded esports. Here, it tested things like Game Pages to make games more discoverable, Super Chat, and Channel Memberships – features which the Amazon-owned game streaming site Twitch had also popularized among the game community.

Some of YouTube Gaming’s features became so well-received that the company brought them to YouTube. For example, this June YouTube introduced channel memberships to its main site. And before that, it had brought Super Chat – a way for creators to make money from live streams – to its broader community, as well.

But while gaming remains one of YouTube’s top verticals, no one was really using the standalone YouTube Gaming app, the company says.

“We have 200 million people that are logged in, watching gaming content every single day,” Ryan Wyatt, YouTube’s Director of Gaming Content and Partnerships, tells TechCrunch. “And the majority of them, quite frankly, are just not using the YouTube Gaming app for their gaming experiences,” he says.

However, data from Sensor Tower shows the app had over 11 million installs across iOS and Android, and those installs have remained consistent over time. That indicates a large number of people were at least willing to try the app. But the firm also found that its daily users were a “tiny fraction” of Twitch’s on iOS, which confirms Wyatt’s point about lack of usage.

Instead, gamers are logging into YouTube to watch gaming, Wyatt explains.

They watch a lot of gaming, too – over the last twelve months, fans streamed more than 50 billion hours of gaming content, and YouTube has over 500,000 quarterly active live gaming streamers.

In other words, YouTube’s decision to sunset the standalone app should not be seen as an admission that it’s ceding this space to Twitch – rather, that it’s now deciding to use the power of YouTube’s flagship app to better compete.

On that front, the company is today launching a new YouTube Gaming destination at youtube.com/gaming. The destination is first available in the U.S., and will roll out globally in the months ahead.

A link to the new vertical will appear in the left-side navigation bar, where you find other top-level sections like Trending and Subscriptions.

The Gaming destination will feature personalized content at the top of the page, based on what you like to watch, along with top live games, the latest gaming videos from your subscriptions, and dedicated shelves for live streams and trending videos.

Another feature, “gaming creator on the rise,” will highlight up-and-coming gaming creators who are still trying to build an audience. That’s something that many say is still an issue on Amazon-owned Twitch – often, their early days are spent streaming to no one. They soon find that they need the blessing of an existing influencer to bring more viewers to their channel.

Wyatt points out, too, that YouTube Gaming won’t be all about live streams.

“The other thing that we learned through this process was that the gaming app, and the narrative around it, was very heavily live-focused. Everybody always talked about all the live streaming and live gaming,” he says. “But what that did was underserve the vast gaming

business. So by moving it over to YouTube main, you have this beautiful combination of both the living gaming streams that are continuing to grow massively on YouTube, as well as all the other VOD content on the platform.”

There are several things that YouTube’s new Gaming destination still lacks, however. Most notably, the ability to live stream gameplay right from your phone.

That’s why the YouTube Gaming app won’t immediately disappear. Instead, it will stick around until March or maybe even April 2019, while YouTube works on porting the experience over to its main site and app.

“We’re still working through that,” Wyatt admits, when asked how the live streaming component will come to YouTube proper. “We haven’t made a decision on if [live game streaming] will be in there by March, but we do need to have a solution for easy mobile capture from the phone,” he says.

The YouTube Gaming app was never a global release, as it was only live in select markets, we should note. YouTube’s Gaming vertical will eventually be launched worldwide. That could make it more of a challenge to Twitch, as it taps into the eyeballs of YouTube’s 1.8 billion users, while also expanding to take advantage of other new YouTube features like Premieres or Merchandise.

“It’s a great opportunity to use those features,” Wyatt notes, regarding the shift from YouTube Gaming to YouTube proper. “And we’re going to keep creating more features that will that will really lend themselves to live, but ultimately we’ll be thinking about really unique ways to apply them to VOD as well,” he says.