iOS 11 beta hints at livestreaming
Soon you may be able to broadcast your screen
Quietly mentioned on one of Apple’s WWDC keynote slides for iOS 11 was “Screen recording.” The idea of recording an iPhone or iPad’s screen isn’t new, of course; you’ve been able to do it for years by using a USB cable to connect a device to QuickTime on a Mac, for example. What the slide referred to is iOS 11’s ability to record its display contents to its own storage, without the involvement of hardware other than the device you’re using.
It now seems Apple’s ambitions for this capability extend beyond recording the display for later editing – in an app like iMovie, say. The Next Web reports that a “Start Broadcast” button has been spotted in one of the developer betas of iOS 11.
While the button doesn’t seem to actually broadcast at the time of writing – pressing it currently starts the plain screen-recording feature – it’s being speculated that it will allow for livestreaming of your phone’s screen.
Right now there has been no confirmation from Apple about the Start Broadcast button’s purpose — or whether it will definitely be available in the publicly released version of iOS 11 that’s scheduled for this fall — but if this really is a new way to stream from a mobile device, we can see why Apple would jump on the opportunity.
User-broadcast video streams have become incredibly popular over the last few years, with YouTube and Facebook Live becoming major destinations for watching feeds. Meanwhile, Amazon’s streaming service, Twitch, recently updated its mobile app to allow broadcasting. There’s huge potential in a livestreaming feature being available system-wide in iOS, without app developers having to implement it in each app.