An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: At its Made On YouTube event on Wednesday, the company announced a new dedicated space for creators to interact with their fans and viewers. The space, called "Communities," is kind of like a Discord server built into a creator's channel. With Communities, YouTube is hoping creators won't need to use other platforms like Discord or Reddit in order to interact with viewers. Communities are a space for viewers to post and interact with other fans directly within a creator's channel. In the past, viewers have been limited to leaving comments on a creator's video. Now, they can share their own content in a creator's Community to interact with other fans over shared interests. For instance, a fitness creator's Community could include posts from fans who are sharing videos and photos from their most recent hike.

To start, the feature is only available to subscribers. The company sees Communities as a dedicated space for conversation and connection, while still allowing creators to maintain control over their content. Conversations in Communities are meant to flow over time, YouTube says, as they would in any other forum-style setting. The new Communities feature shouldn't be confused with YouTube's Community feature, which is a space for creators to share text and images with viewers. The feature launched back in 2016, and doesn't allow viewers to interact with each other. YouTube is testing Communities now on mobile devices with a small group of creators. The company plans to test the feature with more creators later this year before expanding access to additional channels in early 2025.

YouTube said it will start creating metaverse experiences on its video platform, beginning with gaming, following competitors' investments in the buzzy category. From a report: "We'll work to bring more interactions to games and make them feel more alive," Neal Mohan, YouTube's chief product officer, said Thursday in a blog post. "It's still early days, but we're excited to see how we can turn these virtual worlds into a reality for viewers." The world's largest video site, owned by Alphabet's Google, has supported virtual-reality videos since 2016. Google released its VR platform Cardboard in 2014 and a much-derided augmented reality device, Google Glass, in 2013. Still, the company has been slower than rivals to discuss its plans for the much-hyped metaverse -- an immersive digital world where users will interact with digital objects and one another. While many are skeptical that the metaverse is much more than a rebranding of VR, others in the tech industry think it will be the next major platform for social media, gaming, digital asset ownership and more. Google has its own VR/AR division but hasn't released plans for any device in the field.

Microsoft's livestreaming platform Mixer will shut down later today and encourage users to migrate over to Facebook Gaming's livestreaming service, with treasured Mixer Partners getting partner status over there too. Rock Paper Shotgun reports: From what I've seen on my stroll through Mixer on this final day, a whole lot of folks are planning to switch to Twitch. The shutdown comes less than a year after Microsoft went wild recruiting top Twitch streamers including Tyler "Ninja" Blevins with exclusivity contracts rumoured to be worth millions.

Mixer first launched in 2016 under the name 'Beam' then was bought by Microsoft later that year, who renamed it 'Mixer' in 2017. One of its big selling points was shorter delays between the broadcaster and the viewers, so folks could have more back-and-forth and interact more. It also had built-in support for novelty streams like Pokemon controlled by viewers. Microsoft also had their studios integrate Mixer features into games, so Forza Horizon 4 gave rewards for both streaming and watching it on Mixer, Minecraft let viewers vote on things, and so on. "Ultimately, the success of Partners and streamers on Mixer is dependent on our ability to scale the platform for them as quickly and broadly as possible," Microsoft said in the shutdown announcement in June. "It became clear that the time needed to grow our own livestreaming community to scale was out of measure with the vision and experiences that Microsoft and Xbox want to deliver for gamers now, so we've decided to close the operations side of Mixer and help the community transition to a new platform."

You know those notes found plastered on many YouTube videos, often asking for you to "CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE?" Well, they're called annotations and they're being replaced with what YouTube calls "End Screen and Cards," which are mobile-friendly tools that let content creators poll their audience, link to merchandise, recommend videos, and more. Unlike annotations, they work on mobile and are designed to be less obnoxious to viewers. The Verge reports: YouTube says it made this change primarily because annotations didn't work on mobile and most viewers found them obnoxious and unhelpful. The change takes effect on May 2nd, and existing annotations will continue to show up when using the desktop browser version of YouTube. YouTube annotations have felt increasingly outdated and out of place. The small text boxes were meant as a way to let creators link to other videos, write in little jokes, and add ancillary information to a video much like a hyperlink or footnote of sorts. But over the years, annotation use has drastically fallen off, by 70 percent, YouTube product manager Muli Salem says. In fact, a majority of viewers interact with annotations only to close them, so the boxes don't obstruct the video screen. Many users turn them off altogether. So now YouTube is investing entirely in End Screens and Cards, and making both tools easier to use and faster to implement.

itwbennett (1594911) writes A partnership between TV measurement company Nielsen and analytics provider Adobe, announced today, will let broadcasters see (in aggregate and anonymized) how people interact with digital video between devices — for example if you begin watching a show on Netflix on your laptop, then switch to a Roku set-top box to finish it. The information learned will help broadcasters decide what to charge advertisers, and deliver targeted ads to viewers. Broadcasters can use the new Nielsen Digital Content Ratings, as they're called, beginning early next year. Early users include ESPN, Sony Pictures Television, Turner Broadcasting and Viacom.

As the science consultant for The Big Bang Theory for the past seven seasons, Dr. David Saltzberg makes sure the show gets its science right. A few weeks ago, you had the chance to ask him about his work on the show and his personal scientific endeavors. Below you'll find his answers to those questions.

Last week you got a chance to ask the team behind Space Command about their project and all things sci-fi. Marc Zicree, Doug Drexler, David Raiklen, and Neil Johnson were nice enough to put down the blasters and answer a handful of your best questions. David even answered one of his own! Read below to see what they had to say.

Massively reports on statements from EVE Online developer CCP Games indicating that they'll be working with MIT students to see if they can create mobile applications that will interact with EVE . They specifically mention things like skill trainers, route planners, and transaction viewers, but they leave the door open for other apps as well, saying they are "eager to hear what ideas MIT students might come up with."

Peter Wayner writes: "If you're one of the last few who believe that the numbers on your portfolio statement are any more permanent than a spring day, a sun tan, or a wink in a bar, you may want to tune into John Motavalli's new book, Bamboozled At the Revolution: How Big Media Lost Billions in the Battle for the Internet. The book follows the stumbling attempt by the old school in the media to turn their so-called power into dominance over the new domain. Numbers fly back and forth. Executives fret over turf. Dreams of glory float skywards. Yet in the end, it's just as Ecclesiastes warned: 'All are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.'" Read on below.