Canadians’ love of YouTube earns them first look at new feature.

Population has affinity for video

TORONTO • Canadians share more videos online than anyone else, so it’s fitting that Youtube is unveiling its latest social feature in this country.

Beginning Wednesday, Canadians will start receiving a new social chat platform within Google’s YouTube app for iOS and Android. Users will be able to directly send videos to others using a new button, plus create group conversations similar to other messaging applications that allow for discussion or interactive features such as giving videos a heart icon to show appreciation. The idea is to keep the sharing experience within YouTube instead of switching between other applications, which the company hopes will create a less cumbersome experience.

“We wanted to start with Canada because Canadians are sharing 15 per cent more videos than the average user, so it’s interesting to see this is actually a behaviour that happens more in Canada,” Shimrit Ben Yair, San Francisco-based product manager for Google, which owns YouTube, said in an interview. “We launched this feature as an experiment last year (to a small group) and now we are rolling it out worldwide.”

The number of hours people spend watching YouTube continues to grow globally each year, especially on mobile and tablets where the numbers were up 60 per cent year-over-year in 2015, according to YouTube’s internal data. Seventy-five per cent of Canadian YouTube users visit the service several times a day, the firm added.

This trend falls in line with what other companies such as Twitter and Facebook have said about Canada, noting the country consumes a lot of online video and therefore makes for a great testing ground for global rollouts. Canadians spent 44-per-cent more time watching digital video during the past four years, according to the research firm eMarketer, with mobile watching up 127 per cent.

“We thought this was a nice way to expand and really answer a need that exists in the market,” said Ben Yair, who headed up the project.

Because the new social functionality essentially acts like a chat platform — including the ability to name rooms — participants can also use the in-app feature for basic things such as sharing links or making plans. When a YouTube video is shared in the room, users can move the video around on the screen so they can keep chatting while watching.

“The idea is if you have a couple of friends that you share a lot of videos with, this makes it really easy to have that conversation happen right while you are watching YouTube,” said Benoît de Boursetty, one of YouTube’s product managers. “You don’t have to swap between apps, it is a lot more convenient and the user experience once you are in it is a lot better.”

In order to get the new feature, Canadians have to be signed in to a YouTube account and create a channel on their profile (though don’t need to have any videos uploaded). Once a YouTube video is shared with someone using the new button, the recipient will have the feature unlocked on their account no matter where they reside — meaning Canadians, not Google, will be the ones spreading the tool to other countries.