YouTube has announced that starting Tuesday, April 19, it will begin supporting spatial audio and 360-degree live streaming on its service.
The video streaming company YouTube owned by Google confirms with this announcement some reports published earlier this year by Buzfeed claiming that 360-degree live streaming feature was in development. According to the publication Design&Trend, among the first videos created in this more immersive format will be this year's Coachella music event live stream.
YouTube's chief product officer Neal Mohan announced on Google Blog that the support for 360-degree videos was first launched back in March 2015, allowing musicians, athletes and brands to create amazing things with this technology. The difference is that now the company can offer the service on a mass scale.
Spatial audio for on-demand videos for Android is another feature just lunched by YouTube. For now spatial audio only works on Android, but it is expected that in time YouTube will expand its availability to support more platforms. This feature comes to provide a more immersive experience, as users will be able to hear audio depending on which angle they are viewing the 360-degree live stream videos.
YouTube is the first video service to launch spatial audio and 360-degree live streaming at this scale, as pointed out by TechCrunch. The company also brought in some technical improvements to its website, in order to make live 360-degree videos possible.
According to The Verge, now it's possible to live stream YouTube 360 videos at a resolution of 1440p and 60 frames per second. However, in order to take advantage of all these new features it is required to use a new camera rig integrated to YouTube.
Among the camera rigs supporting these new features is the newly announced ALLie Camera that comes at a price tag of $500. There's also the higher-end Orah 4i that costs $1,800 and the cheaper $350 Ricoh Theta.
According to Wired, YouTube is also inviting creators to try out live 360-degree videos in their YouTube Space locations, since not everybody can afford to experiment with the camera rigs. Mohan told the publication that this way creators can focus on what they need, on the best story and the best content possible.
