The Bulletin

The one thing people watching on Facebook or YouTube have that people watching on your website don't is each other. The chat. The "good morning from Ohio," the prayer request, the amen. From today, YouTube streams can bring it along.

On your Live Page

Open the Live Page editor, find the "Live chat" section under the video settings, and switch on "Show live chat." That's it.

While you're live, a "Live Chat" tab with a pulsing red dot appears first in the panel beside the video and opens by itself the moment the stream starts, so the room is full before anyone looks for it. If a visitor had already clicked over to your schedule or links, we leave them where they are. When the stream ends, the tab goes away and the panel returns to your first section.

What's inside the tab is YouTube's own chat, the same messages, emoji, moderation and Super Chats your YouTube viewers see, in the same frame. We can't restyle the inside of it, but it does follow the visitor's light or dark setting, so it never looks pasted on.

A listener wrote in last week: the live stream on their site was playing, but silent, and they'd assumed it was broken. They weren't the first. The stream wasn't broken. The browser was.

Every browser now refuses to autoplay video with sound unless the visitor has interacted with the page first, so a live widget that starts on its own has to start muted. That's the right rule for the web and the wrong experience for someone who opened your site to hear the sermon. YouTube's own tiny speaker icon in the corner of the player doesn't help much, especially on a phone.

So the YouTube live player now carries a pill of its own, bottom-left, reading "Tap for sound." One tap turns the sound on at full volume, a green "Sound on" flashes for a second, and the pill is gone.

Until this week, a live widget had two states: live, and a placeholder. Most of the week it was the placeholder, and a visitor who landed on it had no idea when to come back.

Now the widget carries your schedule. Add your weekly services in the editor, or just schedule the stream on YouTube, Facebook or Twitch the way you already do, and the widget counts down to it. When the stream starts, all of it gets out of the way and the live video takes over, the same as before.