YouNow has quite an explicit startup name. The live streaming startup lets you stream yourself, now. But with more than 150,000 live streams per day, how can you be sure that you didn’t miss a funny or heartwarming moment when you were away? YouNow has a new update that lets you seamlessly share your favorite moments.
Rewatching live streams is nothing new. You can jump back in time on YouTube, Periscope or Facebook Live. But chances are, you’re not going to do it. The last time I talked with YouNow founder and CEO Adi Sideman, he told me that nobody watches live stream archives.
Watching something live makes sense because you can interact with the streamer, you can feel a special connection that only happens during live streaming. But if you’re watching something that already happened, the excitement wears down, and you end up looking at hours of footage for just a few minutes of pure entertainment.
Think about it like sports. Watching the NBA Finals live is exciting — you don’t know what’s going to happen next. But you wouldn’t record the match and watch it later, unless you’re a hardcore fan. It’s the same for YouNow.
Knowing this problem, the YouNow team has come up with an interesting and well-designed solution. Whenever you’re watching a stream on your phone and you find something cool, you can share up to 15 seconds of what just happened in a few taps — just hold your finger on the screen to start sharing.
It doesn’t feel like you’re editing a video and your phone won’t get stuck encoding a clip either. You’re just selecting a few seconds and then you can share this clip everywhere. Clips look like this or this or this.
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This could become a key feature as it expands YouNow’s reach. Soon, YouNow clips will pop up on Facebook or Twitter, making it a good way to discover the service.
Second, it’s a great way to crowdsource live stream compilations. Streamers don’t have to highlight the most important moments of their streams as users are already doing it with today’s new feature. It could improve content discovery as YouNow users will be able to see if a streamer is a good singer, tells great jokes or gives life advice.
Finally, like most creative social networks, there are more people watching streams than YouNow creators. That’s why many profiles remain empty. With these YouNow clips, viewers will be able to build up a profile without firing up the webcam. Now, let’s see if YouNow users are going to embrace the feature and build up an interesting library of moments.