YouTube and Twitch have been vying for supremacy in the streaming sphere for the better part of a decade now, and the battle still rages on. Many streamers are huge fans of Twitch's feature-rich interface, despite the service's myriad other issues, but the team at YouTube seems determined to make their mark in the space as they evolve their platform and add new and much-requested features to their own arsenal.

The newest addition, which started rolling out for selected streamers yesterday, imports Twitch's sub-only chat option to Google's video platform. According to a Tweet from Ryan Wyatt, YouTube's Head of Gaming, the feature has been "a big creator request for live streaming," and gives streamers the option to restrict chat usage just to their subscribers. Creators can switch the setting on and off at their leisure, even mid-stream, and can even set a minimum length of time that viewers need to subscribed if they want to keep their chat extra-exclusive or stop trolls from subscribing on the fly just to make trouble.

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The feature is still in beta at the time of writing, and has only been made available to a small number of streamers, but for the lucky few who are in on it, the process of setting it up is pretty straightforward. From YouTube's Live Control Room page, streamers can just click "Edit" followed by "Live chat," and can then easily change the setting under "Who can send a message."

Wyatt's initial Tweet cryptically promised "more to come" in the coming months, but he also took to the replies to respond to queries about other much-desired streaming features that come as standard on Twitch, like "raiding", which sends viewers to go watch another streamer's channel at the end of a broadcast, and the ability to gift subscriptions to users. Wyatt was still tight-lipped about the specifics of upcoming features for the platform, but he assured streamers in the replies that the YouTube team "hear[s] our creative community on their live streaming feature requests," perhaps suggesting that some of these features might be on the way in the future.

While the announcement is certainly an exciting one, an air of impatient disappointment pervaded some of the replies to Wyatt's Tweet. With the highly-requested feature only being rolled out to a handful of streamers while the team collects feedback and tweaks the service, many other creators just have to watch from the sidelines and wait until they're able to use it too. Many users called Wyatt out on this, bringing up YouTube's Clips feature which is still not available to all users even after commencing its rollout back in January.

Still, even if the process of getting the feature out to everyone on the service is a slow one, fans of YouTube are no doubt thrilled to start seeing some of Twitch's best features manifest in their streaming platform of choice. Whether it's enough to turn the tide of battle between the two streaming services, though, remains to be seen.

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