YouTube launched its gaming site and app today as a competitor to industry-leader TwitchTV.
YouTube Gaming supports both live and recorded gaming video and includes a specialized web site and companion iOS and Android apps.
The web site is a bit slow today, as might be expected as everyone wants to try it out both watching and live streaming.
One small limitation I noticed with the web version is that it doesn’t appear to support streaming of videos to my Chromecast. I assumed it would have this functionality out of the box. You can select the Chromecast icon in your browser and it appears to try to send the live video, but then exits to the generic YouTube screen on the Chromecast. The YouTube Gaming App DOES support Chromecast streaming, though, so at least there is some option. I am guessing a small bug with the web version on launch day which will hopefully be quickly remedied.
I thought YouTube Gaming would automatically follow all my gaming-related YouTube Channels, but in order to follow them on YouTube Gaming I had to “Import” my subscriptions and then click though a list to add each channel. If I had hundreds of channels I was subscribed to it might get a little tedious doing this. though.
Streaming quality looks excellent for the streams I have sampled today and, even on this busy first day, buffering of video seems to be at a minimum.
Check it out!
