NEW YORK—YouTube Gaming is coming. YouTube's Twitch killer was announced on Friday, so we stopped by the YouTube Space in Manhattan to try out a pre-release version of the service. (And we took a ton of screenshots—see below.)

YouTube says the service will launch "this summer"—although it's kind of "this summer" right now—and sure enough, the version we tried out seemed 99% finished. We spent most of our time with the desktop website, and we weren't even on a developer sandbox—it was just the live gaming.youtube.com site with a properly flagged account. Let's get started!

The Interface

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

In its blog post, YouTube neglected to show the most important screenshot: the livestreaming video page, so that was the first place we explored. The live video page is an all-dark interface with a large video player and a tabbed interface to the right. The tabs house chat, the typical YouTube related videos list (which should be great for discovery), and a description tab.

The video player is exactly what you'd expect from YouTube. Live video gets a continually updated seek bar called "DVR mode," and users can pause and rewind a livestream and watch it on a delay—that's a big advantage over Twitch. The gear houses all the usual bandwidth settings, along with YouTube's "auto" setting, which will automatically send whatever your connection can handle.

Subscribing is handled via the "star" button, which for now lights up and that's about it. Keep in mind this is all pre-release software. We'd like to see a popup containing the same options for notifications that we get on Twitch—namely the option to be e-mailed when a broadcaster goes live. In the Q&A session, YouTube mentioned that users can get notifications when a streamer goes live.

And while we're on the subject of subscriptions: a content creator's YouTube subscriptions and Live YouTube Gaming subscriptions are separate. YouTube said that because of the difference in content style and notifications, users in testing often wanted to choose between live and pre-recorded subscriptions. There will be prompts and import options, though, so fans of one type of content will be reminded that the other type of content by the same creator exists.

Next to the "Thumbs up," "Thumbs Down," and "Star" buttons is a fourth button: a "three vertical dots" button that seems like it will someday open a menu. For now it just says "feature not ready"—this is beta software, remember?

We tried chat—it works, but the emote button next to the text input didn't do anything. As silly as it sounds, there's an entire culture that exists around Twitch chat emotes, so it will be interesting to see what Google comes up with.

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Google

Here's the homepage of YouTube Gaming, which is one of the most Material Design-infused websites Google has ever created. The interface is built using Polymer—Google's new toolkit for making "appy" webpages—and it shows. Drawers slide out, tabs slide over and animate, and it feels just like a big smartphone app. YouTube Gaming is slick, and the Twitch interface looks archaic by comparison.

The top "Hero" slot is occupied by featured livestreams and videos, and it horizontally scrolls between a few of them. The most interesting touch on the desktop site is the two vertical panels, one housing icons for the user's starred games and the other housing starred broadcasters. Both of these strips expand into navigation drawers when they are interacted with, showing text for the icons and, after your favorites, appending a list of "popular" suggestions—another feature that seems geared toward discovery. We could easily see someone who doesn't follow gaming news see a new, just-released game at the top of this popular list and click on it.

YouTube also allows users to follow their favorite games, which should also be great input for its recommendation engine: "You like watching this one streamer playing Zelda, so how about this other popular streamer playing Zelda?" Knowing what games the user likes should be a good window into exploring and recommending other broadcasters.

While using the main site, the favorite broadcaster icons on the side are grayed out and not distracting, unless the broadcaster is currently live. Then the icons light up in full color with a red "recording" dot in the lower right. It's basically a "friends" list that follows you around the site and shows who is online—a very nice touch.

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Game pages have a ton of tabs, which we go through above. Since the service isn't live yet, you would think that YouTube Gaming would be a barren wasteland when it comes to content, but it actually had tons of videos. Google put its massive cloud infrastructure to work and scanned YouTube's millions of existing videos and algorithmically picked out and categorized the gaming content. It then organized those by individual video game and even the type of content. Over 25,000 games have a "game page" full of content dedicated to the game.

Like the rest of the site, game pages have a hero slot and a bunch of tabs. There's the "About" page, which pulls a description from Wikipedia, along with pictures and stats for the game. "Explore" shows recommendations, the "Live" tab shows people streaming now (this is basically the Twitch version of a game page) and "Popular" allows you to filter by a few different time periods.The next two tabs are automatically categorized content: "Let's Plays" and "Reviews." For now there is a limited amount of these automatic categories, but the team said they hope to add more in the future, and even mentioned a possibility of a speed run section.

The last tab is for official content, which takes the name of the game developer. In our travels though the demo setup, the "official content" tab usually worked out to be a cool little news section. Like in the example above (last picture) a casual user would find out about the upcoming cosmetic hero DLC in Hearthstone.

The content that was lacking during our demo was, of course, the livestreams. For the most part live streams and pre-recorded video are on even footing though, so the whole interface was properly populated despite only one or two demo live streams that were available. While live and prerecorded video is mixed up, an effort is made to draw attention to the livestreams—thumbnails for live video are tagged with a bright red "live" badge and live channels float to the top of the user's favorite channels list. Live video also usually occupies the top "hero banner" when it's available on game and channel pages.

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Here's the channel page for the official League of Legends Esports account. The tabs are mostly under the streamer's control—they can make tabs and move content into them. Scheduled events show up in an "Upcoming events" tab, and other than the obvious "uploads" and "about," the rest of the tabs seem to be a better form of playlists. In fact, if you look at the playlist page on regular YouTube for this account, the tabs seem to just be the current playlists.

Like everywhere else, the hero slot will be the live broadcast if the streamer is currently broadcasting, along with a carousel of featured content. Tacked on to the end of this gallery is the search page, which, like YouTube said in the press release, is limited to game content only.

While the existing YouTube Gaming clients look great, the service has a long way to go to catch up to Twitch. The current day-one platforms are desktop, Android, and iOS. As far as viewing content on a game console and streaming from it, the team would only say that it was "working with all partners" on console support.

For broadcasters

A livestreaming service is nothing without content creators—these are the people YouTube really needs to talk to if it wants its streaming service to take off. Unfortunately, today's presentation was mostly focused on the user side of things, and we weren't allowed to take pictures of the broadcasting side of the interface. We were allowed to take pictures of the presentation, though, and at one point they briefly walked through the new streaming interface, which you can see below. Yay loopholes!

The broadcasting side of things—which is a section in YouTube's "Creator Studio"— is totally revamped from the current YouTube Live interface. You no longer need to schedule a stream ahead of time to broadcast; just hit the "Go live now" button and you're off and running. The broadcast interface shows real-time data for stream health, number of viewers, and comments per minute and even shows things in little charts. Streamers can use the same livestream session over and over if they want, allowing them to reuse the existing setup.

It will be pretty hard for an audience to exhaust YouTube Gaming's bandwidth. While the broadcast and viewing interfaces are all new, the site infrastructure is basically the existing YouTube Live back end, which means it works at YouTube-scale. The service holds the world record for most simultaneous viewers of a single stream—8 million people—for Felix Baumgartner's freefall from the edge of space. That also means you get the current YouTube Live streaming quality options: from 240p all the way up to 3000-6000Kbps 1080p video at 60fps, and viewers get whatever quality their connection can handle.

The Gaming update does improve the latency of live video—the team says it's down to 12-15 seconds of lag with the improvements, and it's something they'll continue to work on to get it as low as possible. In the streaming dashboard there are two options for latency: "Fast buffering," where the stream would start faster for users, and a "low-latency" option (presumably where this 12-15 second time comes from). Broadcasters can also add an artificial delay if they would like of up to 90 seconds via the YouTube interface, and broadcasting software usually has an additional delay setting.

YouTube's automated copyright enforcer, Content ID, is always a hot button issue for YouTube's creators. On YouTube Gaming, the system will be active, in real time, on livestreams. If copyrighted content is detected during a live stream, the dashboard will show a warning, and streamers will have a set time period to stop the music. If users ignore the warning, the stream will be blocked until the system detects the copyrighted content has stopped.

For now, we think YouTube will have trouble drawing big broadcasters away from Twitch for one reason: it is lacking in the monetization department. YouTube Gaming's monetization pretty much applies the existing pre-recorded system to live video. All the advertising options are here: There are "True-View" (read: skippable) pre-roll ads, in-stream ads that play periodically during the livestream or on-demand, and pop-up display ads. YouTube Gaming is missing Twitch's critical monthly paid subscription system, though, where users opt to pay a monthly fee for the content they watch. For now, we'd imagine most streamers will see the lack of subscription options and stick with Twitch.

The YouTube Gaming team says it's "very interested" in a subscription option, but it wouldn't offer any concrete details. There is the existing YouTube Fan Funding system, at least, which allows for one-time donations.

Unfortunately, Chat isn't based on IRC. Twitch uses IRC for Chat, which allows users to easily moderate their channel with bot programs. YouTube says it doesn't have a chat API yet, but it's working on one. Currently, streamers can promote people to moderators, which can remove messages or ban users. Users can also get a "time out" for a set amount of time instead of a permanent ban. Streamers can set up a blacklist of words, and any message containing that word will be blocked. Chat can also be turned off completely if you want.

There is finally competition in the livestreaming space

Twitch has been the only real name in game streaming for the longest time. It now finally has a serious competitor with practically unlimited cash and bandwidth to deal with. Twitch isn't a tiny independent company anymore, though—it now has Amazon's cash backing, and it should be more than capable of responding. The competition should make things better for everyone.

When asked why people would switch from Twitch to YouTube Gaming, one of the engineers replied, "It's the only one-stop destination for live and recorded gaming content, both VOD and live" which is a compelling story. The new interface and DVR capabilities of YouTube Gaming sound great for users, and streamers get the rock-solid YouTube platform to stream from. The service does a have a few holes to fill around monetization and moderation, though, and it needs to get broadcasting and viewing clients on all the consoles. Courting the broadcasters and listening to their feature requests will be the key to YouTube Gaming's success. The Gaming team says it's just getting started, though, and it seems eager for feedback.

Twitch should be worried, as it's now in a very tough situation. Every single one of Twitch's users is already a YouTube user—the storage is unlimited, there is tons of content, and even Twitch made exporting to YouTube very easy. Twitch needs to give its users a reason to come back from YouTube. The answer to that used to be easy—live video—but now, when users get that same type of content on YouTube, along with all of the pre-recorded videos they're looking for, will anyone go back to Twitch?