YouTube Premiere Adds 4 New Features To Offer A More Interactive Experience For Users

To help creators, artists, and publishers to deliver an even more interactive experience with Premieres and generate buzz for a new video, YouTube is enhancing the capabilities of Premieres with 4 new features. The features include Live Redirect, Trailers, Countdown Themes and Schedule Premieres on Mobile.

YouTube Premieres 2.0

Launched in 2018, the feature Premieres 2.0 lets creators, publishers, and artists turn their brand-new video into a shared viewing experience. We have seen many creators, artists, and publishers across the globe – such as BLACKPINK, Tiny Desk, James Charles, Supercell, and Cirque du Soleil – use Premieres to generate excitement in advance of a video debut. It also has enabled fans to virtually gather, engage, and enjoy a shared experience together. In fact, during the pandemic lockdown period, – that is since March 1, 2020 – YouTube has witnessed over 85% growth in daily Premieres from over 8 million channels, where over 80% of these channels had never before used Premieres.

Premieres allows creators to promote their content ahead of its release on YouTube, with the help of a landing page that will be created for the promotion of the video before its release. This landing page is built keeping in mind the revenue generation possibilities of Live video without actually having to go Live. Creators can publish the newly-uploaded videos at a scheduled time with the help of premieres and this will allow them to generate advance hype. It also will give the creator an opportunity to get people to RSVP through the video’s watch page. 

Viewers can set reminders for premieres on the watch page and choose to get notifications before the start of your premiere. When the premiere begins, a countdown will appear during the first 2 minutes of the premiere. As soon as the countdown ends, viewers can watch the video together in real-time. 

4 New YouTube Premieres Features

Here are the details of the 4 new features coming to Premieres over the next few weeks.

1. Live Redirect

Rolling out to channels starting this month, Live Redirect lets creators put together a multi-part show experience by connecting a live stream to an upcoming premiere. From We Are One Film Festival to New York Comic-Con and BTS to Justin Bieber, YouTube has been testing this feature over the last few months. They have been amazed with the results on how the feature brought the community together. Similar to a pre-party or a red carpet, YouTube has seen its partners use Live Redirect to connect with their audience live, create excitement and anticipation just before the main event. That is, the main aim of this feature is to help creators build excitement and engage their community before the new content is revealed.  

 

Allowing creators to host a live pre-show, interview, or Q&A, this feature will also right away redirect their audience to the premiere page when their live stream ends. However, a creator cannot, host an interview on another channel and direct the audience to a premiere on their own channel, instead Live Redirects can only be set up between videos from the same channel.

2. Trailers

From now onwards, Premieres will have its own trailer, which is a pre-recorded hype video -between 15 seconds and 3 minutes long.

 

Trailers are displayed on the premiere watch page when a viewer lands on it before the video is scheduled to begin. It helps to create an even more compelling experience and encourages viewers to set a reminder to tune into the Premiere. 

As the video needs to be 3 minutes long to work with, creators can put together more convincing content to generate interest in their video launch. If there is no trailer, then a static thumbnail will be displayed on the watch page.

NOTE: One channel cannot use a video from another channel as its trailer and ads need to exist as a standalone video on the creator’s channel otherwise they won’t be eligible to run on a trailer. 

3. Countdown Themes

YouTube is giving more alternatives to the channels when it comes to the countdown displayed instantly before a video premiere. So far, there has been only one countdown theme available, and users frequently raised their concerns that the countdown theme is not reflecting the correct tone of the video that followed. YouTube considered their concerns and designed 10 new countdown themes that span a variety of different content verticals and moods. That is, whether you’re looking for something calm, playful, dramatic, or sporty, creators are now able to adapt the Premiere countdown theme to suit the tone of their video. However, the length of countdowns must be in between 1 minute to 10 minutes.

The new countdown themes will be available in the coming months.

4. Schedule Premieres via YouTube Mobile App

Now for the first time, creators can schedule Premieres through the YouTube mobile app. With this update, creators will be able to upload a video from their mobile device and schedule it as a Premiere, all at the same time. Earlier, creators could schedule Premieres only through the YouTube desktop site. 

YouTube is working towards making these features more broadly available in the future.  However, among the new features, to access Live Redirect and Trailers, channels need to have at least 1,000 subscribers.

Every day, people from around the world come to YouTube to experience the world’s biggest cultural moments, and especially, during these hard times, many in-person events that are being replaced by live streams and pre-recorded videos are streamed through YouTube. With these new features, we can expect YouTube Premieres to be a more exciting online hangout.