This week, YouTube is being very generous to its livestreamers (and their viewers), Threads is taking a leaf out of Instagram’s book and launching a new feature similar to Broadcasts, X is upgrading its AI offering, and more.
Meanwhile – the girls are fighting. Alix Earle and Alex Cooper’s feud has social talking. Is it a PR stunt? Who knows? Social is just desperate to know the drama. Read on for more social media news.
YouTube launches new features for livestreams
Video credit: YouTube
YouTube is delaying ads on livestreams if the livestream chat has high engagement. If viewers are supporting the stream with paid features like Super Chat, Super Stickers or gift purchases, YouTube will display a personal ad-free window. This is essentially to keep momentum going during the stream. Other new livestream features include, viewers being able to send GIFs on horizontal livestreams, not just vertical ones, creators being able to go live in both vertical and horizontal formats at the same time, and all viewers living in the same chat.
Threads is adding a new feature to help users keep up to date with events and topic discussions. The new feature called live chats is quite similar to Instagram’s Broadcast Channels. Users will be able to start a live chat with collaborators and send messages during an event/on a topic. Other users can then subscribe to and interact with the chat, but not send messages.
xAI has announced a series of new AI updates including new speech-to-text APIs, increasing some of its API charges, starting a collaboration with OpenClaw, and is looking at launching a new coding terminal. xAI is also working on a way to get more original posts on X to get more back-end data into its AI system.
TikTok is bringing Seedance 2.0 AI video gen model to its Symphony ad tool kit. Seedance 2.0 is from TikTok’s parent company ByteDance. Advertisers will use Symphony in the same way as usual but will generate “polished video with audio that’s perfectly in sync.” As explained by TikTok: “The model improves the consistency of products throughout content, so they remain recognisable across video segments with fewer manual corrections. Motion is also more natural, with smoother movement throughout. Together, these improvements mean less time spent fixing outputs and more time scaling your campaigns.”
