YouTube’s chief product officer, Neal Mohan, announced on Twitter that YouTube is adding a new prompt label to show that a channel is live streaming on the platform.
This includes displaying a prompt ring with the word “Live” around its profile picture when a channel is a life, which viewers can click to jump directly to the live broadcast. This feature can make it easier for people to find current live content when browsing YouTube.
If the feature sounds familiar, it’s probably because it’s already used in some other services. TikTok uses a similar live notification ring effect, and if someone is live, it’s easy to spot on the channel’s profile picture as viewers scroll through their video in the feed.
Really focused making it easier for users to find livestreams on @YouTube so we're rolling out the Live rings feature on mobile! @YouTubeCreators streaming live will now have a ring around the channel avatar & clicking on the avatar will take you directly to the livestream. pic.twitter.com/QylUbpktum
— Neal Mohan (@nealmohan) February 18, 2022
Instagram is also displaying a colored ring around the profile picture of live-streaming accounts, and it also displays them at the top of the feed.
Like Stories, it started out as a Snapchat feature and was quickly cloned by every other platform, and it worked so well that Google had to integrate them into YouTube.
But the biggest example of YouTube taking inspiration from TikTok is undoubted “Shorts,” a feature that allows viewers to scroll through short-form content by scrolling vertically.