YouTube’s a gigantic swishling pot of gameplay videos, as you might have noticed, but it’s about to become even more gigantic and slightly more swishling with the addition of a new live-streaming API for developers. Announced at GDC and reported by The Verge, the new streaming tech will allow devs to broadcast video directly from within their games and on to YouTube, which sounds awfully like something you’d assumed they could already do.
That’s probably because some developers already can — as The Verge point out, Black Ops 2 already enjoys such convenient YouTube streaming features, casually pumping its guns on to the internet as it pleases — though YouTube are now promising to roll out the functionality to even more developers and stream these feeds to even more devices, including Android and iOS. The video giant also points out that fully one third of all game-related searches take place on YouTube, presumably with the remaining two thirds made up of me searching Wikipedia for release dates.
It’ll be interesting to see if the streaming API trickles down to the consumer level, where it will find use beyond a pre-release marketing and eSports tool. YouTube told GDC attendees that the functionality will eventually reach “users of all kinds”. That’s you!