Video sharing platform YouTube has announced an interesting in-app messaging feature to its Android and iOS applications. The new feature is currently rolled out only in Canada but some rumors say that this is the testing step only and after the company gets feedback from its users will decide on the wider rollout.
Canada’s Financial Post spoke with the Google Product Manager, Shimrit Ben Yair, and wrote that there are some reasons behind choosing Canada for this upcoming rollout. One of which says that Canada is the ideal testing ground. Moreover, the population is much less, hence easy to manage and Canada’s market conditions are very similar to that of the US.
According to Shirmit Ben Yair, San-Francisco-based product manager of Google, “We wanted to start with Canada because Canadians are sharing 15 percent more videos than the average user, so it’s interesting to see this is actually a behavior that happens more in Canada. We launched this feature as an experiment last year (to a small group) and now we are rolling it out worldwide.”
This new upcoming built-in messaging feature would allow users to share messages with each other over the app itself. YouTube now wants to ensure that its own platform is privy to all those conversations and places that have YouTube videos as their central theme.
Furthermore, users can also create rooms where particular videos can be discussed. For that, you just have to create a room and then share a particular video there, and later all the users within the room can watch that video. The video screen can also be moved around the screen to give access to the chatting interface.
YouTube doesn’t yet claim anything about rolling this feature broadly.
