Blogroll

Along with the new features for YouTube viewers unveiled at the company's big Made on YouTube event on Wednesday, YouTube announced a whole suite of features for content creators, too.

For the most part, creators have used their YouTube channels to distribute content. Over the years, YouTube has rolled out features to help users create content, too. But with these latest announcements, YouTube is taking its biggest step yet into the content creation process.

SEE ALSO: YouTube is giving livestream communities more ways to play, pay, and participate

One of the event's biggest announcements for creators is the conversational editing assistant coming to YouTube Shorts and YouTube Create in early 2027.

The conversational editing assistant will help creators edit their footage into videos and short-form clips, using only natural-language conversation, as they would with a chatbot. The editor can pick the best takes, edit clips together with transitions, add text, and more. 

Credit: YouTube

Of course, AI plays a role here, but YouTube was adamant that its AI tools are meant to assist YouTubers in creating content themselves, not do it for them. 

In addition to the editing assistant, YouTube unveiled several new Insight tools for creators seeking guidance on what their viewers want to see.

There's a new feature coming to the Insights section of YouTube Studio's Analytics called Research, which will show creators the top videos in their niche that their own viewers have been watching.

YouTube Insight Research Credit: YouTube

In addition, YouTube Studio can now provide video feedback on new video content that hasn't been published yet. Previously, YouTubers could get insights into their videos to see what worked and what didn't. Now, creators can upload videos directly just to use this feature and make changes based on YouTube's recommendations before a video goes live.

Thumbnails are also getting a big upgrade on YouTube. Creators can generate customizable thumbnails on YouTube and, if they're unsure which thumbnail to use, use multiple thumbnails with the new Dynamic Thumbnails feature.

YouTube Dynamic Thumbnails Credit: YouTube

Dynamic Thumbnails will show viewers thumbnails that YouTube's algorithm believes will most resonate with that particular user.

A/B testing for thumbnails has been a feature in YouTube Studio for some time. Now, YouTube is rolling out A/B testing for an entire video. Creators can upload multiple Shorts or long-form video edits and then select the main cut based on what users like best based on viewer retention data.

Video A/B testing Credit: YouTube

Ask Studio, which YouTube announced is also coming to mobile, can now parse a creator's back catalog of videos and optimize previous content with new thumbnails and A/B test features.

Fedora is easily one of the best Linux distributions out there, but the default software manager it ships with isn’t doing it any favors. Whether you're on Fedora Workstation with GNOME Software or running Fedora KDE with Discover, both are painfully slow to load and offer an overall buggy experience. I can't tell you how many times I've searched for an app, gotten an empty screen, and assumed the app just wasn't available — when it was actually just stuck loading.

Netflix has used artificial intelligence to (in a sense) resurrect a beloved star of stage and screen.

As of Wednesday, several episodes of the new Netflix reality competition show Wonka's Golden Ticket are now available on the popular streaming service. This show has been a source of some controversy ever since its announcement over the summer, as its "host" is an AI-generated Gene Wilder who exists in voice form. Reviews of the series from outlets like Variety and NME have criticized the practice, with Variety calling it "ghoulish."

You can get a feel for how it works in the trailer, but the essential fact is this: Wilder's AI voice is used to host the game show. Its challenges and general aesthetic are loosely based on the 1971 Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory film, rather than the original Roald Dahl book or any of the later Hollywood adaptations. Crucially, this AI-generated Wilder is never seen, only heard, with NME calling this version of the deceased actor "blatantly cruel."

It's worth mentioning that Wilder's estate gave permission for Netflix to do this, but that hasn't stopped people online from reacting to it in a not-entirely-positive manner. We've seen similar controversies play out in other cases where deceased entertainers have been resurrected with AI (with the permission of their estate).

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Reddit

Hopefully, nobody gets stuck inside a TV or turned into a giant blueberry if they lose on the game show.

SEE ALSO: It's time to add AI protections to your will

There's little argument that, among today's flat-panel display technologies, OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) screens are objectively the best.

A big upside to owning a 3D printer is being able to print things for next to nothing when you need them. While tools made from filament like PLA and PETG lack the durability of even their cheapest metal counterparts, they’re often good enough in a pinch.

SAVE $549.01: As of Sep. 23, get the Anker Solix S2000 Portable Power Station for $649.99 at Amazon. That's down from its usual price of $1,199.

Opens in a new window Credit: Amazon Anker Solix S2000 Portable Power Station $649.99 at Amazon
$1,199 Save $549.01   Get Deal

Fall's cooler temperatures may be blowing in, but don't discount the power of an autumn thunderstorm.

Whether you live in an area that's prone to blackouts during the season or you just want to make sure you've got what you need to stay on the grid, a portable power station is always a good investment. And if you're fast, you can snag one for an excellent price right now thanks to this Amazon lightning deal.

As of Sep. 23, get the Anker Solix S2000 Portable Power Station for $649.99 at Amazon, down from its usual price of $1,199. That's $549.01 off for a limited time.

SEE ALSO: The 6 best power stations for camping keep you both online and off-grid

The Anker Solix S2000 is a great option if you're looking for a reliable power station to provide electricity if yours goes out. It's perfect for use at home, with AC ports on both the front and back to power a variety of devices.

It offers 2,010Wh of capacity, and Anker claims it can keep even large appliances like your refrigerator running for up to 35 hours, so your food doesn't have to spoil just because you don't have electricity.

Its low power draw of 6W makes it a convenient pick for keeping all your devices powered up, as does its under-10ms uninterrupted power supply —- which means that should your power go out, your Solix power station can handle the load in less than that time.

Nathan Fielder first teased his Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything, earlier in Sept. with a tense minute-long exchange between the two.

Now, Fielder (The Rehearsal) posted A24's official trailer on social media, showing a deeper look into the time he spent with Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans. As Mashable previously reported, You Can See Everything, directed by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim (Primetime), chronicles the weeks before Holmes went to prison to serve her over 11-year sentence for fraud. It then spans a three-year journey "into the abyss," according to the film description on A24's website.

Fielder lived with Holmes, Evans, and their children on their invitation. The trailer shows Fielder questioning both Holmes and Evans — the motives of the former, and whether Evans trusts his wife. Holmes, who founded the bunk health tech company Theranos, insists she has nothing to hide, while her husband insists he's never been suspicious that she's lied to him.

The trailer ends with Holmes admitting it's taken her a long time to be OK with anyone seeing her cry.

You Can See Everything hits theatres on Oct. 16.

Want more film and TV news and reviews delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for Mashable’s Top Stories newsletter or get Mashable push alerts.

At a glance

• Challenges a core assumption in robotics AI: Our research shows that running physical AI inference exclusively on onboard GPUs can limit robot performance, battery life, and scalability, and that offloading inference to edge or cloud GPUs can offer significant advantages.
• Demonstrates measurable benefits of inference offloading: Across representative mobile manipulation workloads, offloading improved task success rates, enabled larger AI models, and helped robots respond more effectively in dynamic, real-world environments.
• Extends robot operating time: Replacing power-hungry onboard AI compute with lightweight onboard hardware and remote inference can substantially improve battery life, enabling robots to operate longer between charges.
• Introduces a new capability in the Physical AI Toolchain: Developers can now containerize, deploy, and orchestrate robotics AI workloads across robots, edge infrastructure, and the cloud using Kubernetes-based tooling for distributed inference.

Readily-available physical AI, with robotics assisting users in manufacturing, home, and warehouses scenarios, holds immense potential to improve safety, productivity, and assistance across a wide range of tasks. In many ways, AI for the physical world represents a major frontier for AI . Physical AI must operate in open, unpredictable environments, interact with both other robots and people, and work with a diversity of embodiments. Realizing this vision requires advances along three dimensions: robot hardware, embodied AI models, and systems infrastructure for training and inference. While robot hardware and the AI models have advanced rapidly in recent years, we turn our focus on a relatively under-addressed aspect: inference infrastructure of physical AI. Enabling robots to effectively and safely operate in the physical world will require sophisticated systems to handle large volumes of distributed inference compute.

Today, the prevailing approach to physical AI is to provision a GPU onboard the robot, e.g., by wiring a GPU to the robot. In this model, the robot’s inference will be confined to the onboard GPU, and provide the robot with the necessary chunks and sequence of actions for the execution of its tasks. While higher-level planning may be performed in the cloud, task execution typically remains tied to the robot itself. We challenge this assumption.  As physical AI models grow in size and sophistication, the constraints of onboard compute become increasingly apparent. GPUs consume significant power, reduce battery life, add cost and weight, and can limit the ability to run the latest generation of AI models. 

To better understand the systems implications of physical AI, we conducted the first systematic study of robotics workloads. We focused on mobile robotic manipulation, with the canonical task such as “check for rubbish in the kitchen and put it in the trash.” Such a task involves planning the path to the kitchen, perceiving the environment to find rubbish, navigating to the rubbish, picking up the rubbish, and navigating back to the trash can for disposal. We evaluated representative models across three core capabilities: semantic mapping and planning, navigation, and manipulation, as summarized in Figure 2. 

Figure 2: Details of the models used for the different components of mobile manipulation.

Offloading physical AI inference out of the robot improved its response time and accuracy, along with battery lifetime and cost. We evaluated the inference models across a range of onboard, edge, and cloud compute configurations. Details of the specific test hardware are available in our technical report. 

Benefits in task performance: Our evaluation shows offloading inference can significantly improve robot performance across mapping, planning, navigation, and manipulation workloads. Some smaller GPUs could not accommodate the mobile manipulation stack. On GPUs with sufficient memory, mapping and planning slowed by up to 383% compared to an A100, thus limiting the robot’s abilities in dynamic spaces. Navigation showed a 30% drop in its timely detection of obstacles with lighter GPUs. While the VLA models did not dramatically slow down with smaller GPUs, the slowdown was still sufficient to drop their accuracies by 50%. In other words, onboard GPUs limited the performance of the robots while offloading their inference to an on-premise or cloud GPU boosts their operations, as shown in the videos below and quantified in the graphs. As physical AI models continue to grow in size and complexity, the benefits of offloading are likely to become even more pronounced.

Figure 3a: The video shows the handover task with onboard GPUs. Figure 3b: The video shows the handover task when the inference is offloaded. Figure 4: Success rates of robot arms handing over objects to each other when inference is performed with different GPUs (some onboard, and some offloaded). Offloading improves success rates.

Benefits in battery lifetime: Beyond performance, onboard GPUs also significantly drained the battery life of the robot. We compared the increase in battery lifetime by replacing an onboard GPU with a Raspberry Pi-5 board and shipping all the data to the offloaded GPU. The larger onboard GPUs, such as Jetson Thor, drained robot batteries by up to 160% (or a few hours) for even the larger robots.

Figure 5: Impact of offloading GPU inference on the battery life of the robots; the above numbers are for the Stretch-3 robot.

The above results show that offloading GPU inference out of the robot is critical for functioning in the open world with large models and long battery lifetimes. Nonetheless, offloading inference out of the robot involves a complex tradeoff involving performance, network latency and bandwidth, and available GPU resources. We believe that our measurement study will inform the design of physical AI inference systems.

video series

On Second Thought

A video series with Sinead Bovell built around the questions everyone’s asking about AI. With expert voices from across Microsoft, we break down the tension and promise of this rapidly changing technology, exploring what’s evolving and what’s possible.

Explore the series Opens in a new tab Toolset for automatic offload

We have built a toolset for easy inference offloading out of the robot and distributing inference between the edge GPU and cloud. Kubernetes is a natural platform to provide a uniform abstraction to distribute robotic AI between the robot’s compute, edge GPU, and overflowing to the cloud. The toolset allows automatic containerization and offloading of robotics workloads using declarative specifications, distributes physical AI containers with smart policies using Kubernetes, and integrates with robotic simulators, LeRobot, and ROS2 for easy development. The sequence of steps below shows how the toolset can be prompted with what to offload, and how it creates a separate container for GPU inference and offloads the same.

Figure 6: Steps in the offloading toolset with containerization and deployment.

Microsoft has recently released the Physical AI Toolchain (opens in new tab) for operationalizing physical intelligence at scale. Physical AI Toolchain is an open-source, production-ready framework that integrates Microsoft Azure (opens in new tab) cloud services with NVIDIA’s (opens in new tab) physical AI stack, accelerating robotics and physical AI developers to automate and scale data curation, augmentation, and evaluation across perception, mobility, imitation learning, and reinforcement learning pipelines. We are announcing the addition of an industry-first capability for offloaded physical AI inference for robots as part of the Physical AI Toolchain. This release includes example projects for offloading inference of a SO-101 and a UR10e. The videos below show the offloading of the inference of Microsoft’s Rho model, targeted at dual-arm robots, to a Jetson Thor GPU, which controls the actions of the Mobile Aloha robot (opens in new tab).  

Figure 7a: Offloading of GPU inference of Microsoft’s Rho model controlling the Mobile Aloha robot for interactions with the BusyBox to press the blue button. Figure 7b: Offloading of GPU inference of Microsoft’s Rho model controlling the Mobile Aloha robot for interactions with the BusyBox to turn the knob to position 4.

Check out the inference offload feature, look into the source code, and let us know your feedback. We have already tested it with many real-world use cases, and look forward to hearing about your deployment experiences.

Opens in a new tab

The post Offloaded inference for real-world physical AI robotics appeared first on Microsoft Research.

Have you heard people talking about Docker but have no idea what it is or if you need it? Docker is a fantastic tool that I think belongs in every homelab—here’s what Docker is, and why it is the one tool that makes my homelab easy to manage.

SAVE $48: As of Sept. 23, the Samsung 55-Inch M70H Series Mini LED 4K Smart TV is on sale at Amazon for $299.99. That's down 14% from its $347.99 list price.

Opens in a new window Credit: Samsung Samsung 55-Inch M70H Series 4K Smart TV $299.99 at Amazon
$347.99 Save $48   Get Deal

If you've been waiting for Mini LED tech to drop down to budget-tier prices, this is your green light. Amazon just shaved 14% off the 2026 55-inch Samsung M70H Series Mini LED 4K Smart TV, bringing it down to $299.99.

Old-school budget TVs rely on a handful of large LEDs pushing light through the screen, which usually leaves you with washed-out blacks and terrible glare. The M70H fixes that by packing thousands of tiny LEDs behind the glass. The setup delivers three times brighter highlights and twice as deep contrast as standard 4K panels, meaning sunlight won't ruin afternoon sports, and dark movie scenes won't look muddy.

SEE ALSO: Early October Prime Day TV deals are live: We found rare deals on TCL, LG, Hisense, and more

It also comes packed with features designed to keep your setup simple and responsive. The native panel runs at 60Hz for regular TV, but switches to a 120Hz Dual Line Gate mode when you launch games, keeping fast-paced action buttery smooth and lag-free. If you're big on live sports, the Soccer Mode setting bumps up motion clarity by 40% so you can follow fast passes, while boosting turf colors by 30% for a vivid, stadium-like look.

With the M70H, you can access cloud gaming platforms like Xbox Cloud Gaming and GeForce Now directly from the TV without needing a console plugged in. As an added bonus, Samsung TV Plus comes pre-installed, giving you instant access to news, movies, and live sports without paying any monthly subscription fees.

Grab the Samsung M70H Series Mini LED 4K Smart TV while it’s sitting under the $300 mark. 

I'm a huge fan of wired internet, even if the cables can be a bit of a mess (which can be fixed on the cheap). But Ethernet connections aren't the best for everything, not by a mile.

Taylor Swift has emerged from post-wedding bliss to grant us new music. The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore is out Friday and will feature four new songs: "Patient Zero," "Cleveland!," "Pink Clouding," and "Babylon." The first was announced yesterday after Swift teased her audience with her signature Easter Eggs.

"About a year ago, you guys did a truly unfathomable thing. Something that completely blew my mind… You gave The Life of a Showgirl the biggest first week for an album in history," Swift posted to social media, including X. "I took a trip to Sweden to celebrate with Max and Shellback, my two collaborators on this album. Really we just wanted to reflect and take in how grateful we were for the moment we were in, but there was a studio there and we did what we do when we feel anything at all: We wrote more songs."

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

"I hope you love them, because they were born out of pure gratitude for your exuberance for and celebration of the album we made," Swift wrote.

SEE ALSO: Taylor Swift crashes Mariska Hargitay's 'Law & Order SVU' sketch at the Emmys

Unsurprisingly, the internet had a lot to say (or emote, through gifs) about this:

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

The greige photos attached to "Patient Zero" also drummed up some response, as fans (and antis) wondered if they were edited, even with AI:

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

AI or not, the shot of her leaning against the wall as giving "senior portraits," the internet opined:

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

But this is Taylor Swift, after all, so Swifties were ready to come out in full force to support her:

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Buying smart home devices that rely on cloud-based services is always a risk. If the cloud service goes down, or worse, is discontinued completely, then your smart home devices can become nothing but expensive paperweights. Thankfully, there are plenty of open-source projects that can rescue smart home devices that have been abandoned by their manufacturers.

The U.S. is a big country, and we don't all experience the seasons in the same way, but for a lot of us, fall is definitely here. The weather is cooler, football is happening, new iPhones have arrived, and all of that means it's almost time to move the clocks back to close out Daylight Saving Time 2026.

Since you're reading this, you're probably wondering exactly when that's supposed to happen. After all, it can get confusing as to whether or not we're even in DST at any given point in time, and the beginning and end of it always sneak up on us every year. Fret not, though, because we have an answer: DST ends this year on Nov. 1, with clocks moving back from 2 a.m. to 1 a.m. overnight.

Yes, that means you get an extra hour of sleep.

SEE ALSO: New cat species identified for first time in 100 years

This, of course, does not apply to municipalities that don't observe DST, such as Hawaii and most of Arizona. But for the rest of us, we're going to have to manually adjust some of our clocks to reflect the change...after that extra long night of sleep, of course. It's also worth noting that any device you own that's connected to the internet, such as a smartphone or laptop, will most likely change its own time automatically.

But if you have an older car or you rely on the clock on your stove, make a note to move it back an hour on Nov. 1.

Lots of task-tracking software is costly and comes with more features than you need. I built a dynamic task tracker that does everything I need in three quick steps—and if you have Excel for Microsoft 365 or Excel for the web and a spare 10 minutes, you can too.

Microdramas aren't so micro anymore, at least when it comes to their audience.

Microdrama content on YouTube surpassed 6.5 billion views globally in the first half of 2026, according to new data YouTube shared Wednesday at its annual Made on YouTube event in New York City. Watch time for the bite-sized, serialized shows grew more than 50 percent year over year during the same period.

And despite a format practically engineered for the vertical smartphone screen, people aren't only watching on their phones. YouTube says views of microdrama content on TVs increased by more than 90 percent year over year during the first half of 2026.

YouTube is now giving creators more tools to capitalize on that appetite for short-form, episodic storytelling. The company announced Shorts Series, a new feature that lets creators organize individual Shorts into structured series, complete with custom thumbnails and sequential playback.

SEE ALSO: MeganPlays has been on YouTube for 13 years. Here's what she's learned.

The idea is to make Shorts behave a little more like episodes of a show. Instead of viewers encountering one video in isolation and having to hunt for the next installment, creators can package them together so audiences can discover a series and keep watching in order.

That could be particularly useful for microdramas, which depend on viewers following a story across multiple short episodes. And with audiences increasingly watching those stories on their TVs, the distinction between scrolling through Shorts and sitting down to watch a show is starting to look a little less clear.

Shorts Series is available globally in YouTube Studio for creators and across web, mobile, and TV for viewers.

Featured Video For You "How Online Are You" ft. Taryn Delanie Smith & Kay Poyer Everyone wants a piece of the microdrama boom

If you've suddenly started hearing a lot about microdramas, there's a reason. There's a lot of money in them.

Omdia estimates the global microdrama industry generated $11 billion in revenue in 2025 and will grow to $14 billion by the end of 2026, with the U.S. expected to account for roughly $1.5 billion of that this year.

The format also appears particularly good at holding viewers' attention on the devices where they're already spending much of their time. According to Omdia's analysis of mobile usage data from late 2025, U.S. ReelShort users spent an average of 35.7 minutes per day in the app, more daily mobile viewing time than users spent with Netflix, Prime Video, or Disney+.

Microdramas are relatively cheap and fast to produce, designed around constant hooks and cliffhangers, and built for the way audiences already scroll through short-form video.

It helps that microdramas borrow some of the most addictive mechanics of social video. Episodes typically run only a few minutes, move quickly, and end on cliffhangers designed to send viewers straight into the next one. They're also relatively cheap and fast to produce compared with traditional television, allowing studios to test lots of stories and quickly double down on what audiences actually watch.

And traditional entertainment companies want in. NBCUniversal's Peacock launched its first original vertical microdramas this summer, including Campus Confidential: Miami, built around the company's existing Bravo fandoms. WEBTOON followed with Short Dramas, a slate of six live-action vertical series adapted from popular romance webcomics, including Maybe Meant to Be, Love Bites, and I'll Marry Your Brother. Even late-night franchises like The Daily Show and The Tonight Show have gotten in on the format, producing their own satirical vertical soap operas.

YouTube has been experimenting, too. Earlier this year, the company announced a slate of creator-led programming that included HopeScope's I Acted in a Microdrama, a series of 60-second Shorts in which creator Hope Allen tries her hand at the genre.

Part of the appeal is obvious: microdramas are relatively cheap and fast to produce, designed around constant hooks and cliffhangers, and built for the way audiences already scroll through short-form video. But YouTube's new data suggests the format may be stretching beyond its mobile origins.

A 90 percent jump in TV views doesn't mean viewers are abandoning their phones for the couch. But it does suggest that the distinction between "short-form mobile video" and more traditional episodic entertainment is getting blurrier — just as YouTube gives creators more tools to make Shorts behave like television.

From YouTubers and TikTok stars to streamers and podcasters, Mashable talks to creators about how they built their platforms, the gear they swear by, and the trends they see coming next. Read more of our creator coverage, sign up for our Trending Now and Top Stories newsletters or get Mashable push alerts to discover the internet's most exciting voices.

Unlike some other social media platforms, YouTube is actually pretty good at finding relevant content for users. The platform's recommendation algorithm reviews your watch history, channel subscriptions, and other relevant metrics, then serves up more engaging content to keep viewers entertained and watching.

At YouTube's annual Made for YouTube event on Wednesday, the company announced a slew of new features for users that'll make it even easier to find what they want.

One feature, called Custom Feeds, will allow users to customize the type of content they see on their YouTube homepage for the first time. Users will be able to create a Custom Feed, telling YouTube, in natural language, exactly what kind of content they want to see in this feed. 

For example, a user can tell YouTube that it wants a Custom Feed with "long documentaries" or "new DIY creators," and a Custom Feed tab will appear on their YouTube homepage serving up that content.

Setting up a Custom Feed Credit: YouTube

Custom Feeds will live inside tabs at the top of the YouTube homepage, so they'll continue to see the usual YouTube homepage recommendations if they choose to do so. Users will be able to create multiple Custom Feeds with varying content requests, and they will all be accessible in those tabs on the homepage.

Your Custom Feed is ready! Credit: YouTube

According to YouTube, Custom Feeds are rolling out to users in the U.S. soon.

Along with Custom Feeds, YouTube announced new features for "Ask YouTube," which will let users ask YouTube questions about products in review videos. This new feature will give Ask YouTube the capability to provide more information about products and serve up video recommendations to go more in-depth on your product questions.

YouTube also announced a new podcast-related feature that will provide users with a personalized, AI-generated audio guide presenting their podcast lineup and recommending new podcasts and episodes based on their interests.

Posts on YouTube are getting an upgrade, too. Viewers will now be recommended Posts from the Shorts feed. Posts will also be added to YouTube's TV apps soon as well.

Livestream viewers have never been content to just sit back and watch. They chat. They donate. They subscribe. They clip. They make memes. They tell the streamer what to do next. Sometimes, they even feed cats thousands of miles away.

Barbara Macdonald remembers that last one particularly well. Macdonald, YouTube's product manager for Live, has worked on the platform's livestreaming products for more than a decade. Years ago, after YouTube opened an API that let creators connect Super Chats and channel memberships to real-world effects, someone hooked a livestream to a cat-feeding station in Russia. A viewer could send money from their own home and watch as food was dispensed for the cats on screen.

"I would say Live has always been really focused on how audiences are able to participate and control the action," Macdonald told Mashable. "That's what makes live stand out from asynchronous video."

Now, YouTube wants to give creators and their communities a lot more ways to do exactly that.

At its annual Made on YouTube event in New York City on Wednesday, the platform is unveiling more than 30 new products and features for creators and viewers, including a slate of updates aimed specifically at livestreaming. Among them are Live Showdowns, timed competitions between creators in which audience participation can influence who wins; an expansion of Watch With, which lets creators build live commentary around other YouTube content; and a pilot that brings YouTube's Auto-Dubbing technology to live video.

SEE ALSO: The Mashable 101: The creators defining the internet in 2026

The announcements arrive as YouTube makes a bigger push into a live format it has supported since 2011. But the company's bet isn't that livestreaming is suddenly becoming interactive. It always has been. Instead, YouTube is building more of the behaviors that already define livestream communities — collaboration, competition, fan funding, and audience participation — directly into its products.

And with more than 600 million logged-in viewers already watching live content on YouTube every day, the company now wants to give more creators a reason to go live.

YouTube wants more creators to go live It's time for a Live Showdown. Credit: YouTube

Macdonald has watched YouTube Live change dramatically since she first started working on the product. Around 2019, she said, livestreaming began moving away from its more desktop-heavy, high-production roots toward something increasingly mobile and casual.

YouTube has responded by investing more in mobile live creation and discovery. Looking toward 2027, Macdonald said her team's priorities can essentially be reduced to two things: reach and monetization.

"When you go live to an empty room, you're there doing a stream so you can engage with an audience and riff back and forth with them," she said. "We want to get you as many relevant eyeballs as we can."

One way YouTube hopes to do that is by making collaboration easier. An update to Go Live Together will introduce smart matching, allowing creators who are live at the same time to find one another and link up. From there, they can choose to launch a Live Showdown.

Let's Go Live Together, shall we? Credit: YouTube

During a Showdown, activity from each creator's audience contributes to a competition displayed on screen. Free participation counts, meaning viewers don't have to pay to influence the result. But paid interactions — including Super Chats, Super Stickers, gifts, and gifted channel memberships — count more. That's another potential revenue stream for creators. It also raises an obvious question: At what point does participating in a livestream start to feel pay-to-play?

Macdonald, who previously worked on YouTube's fan-funding products, including Super Chat, said it's a tension the company has considered for years.

"We do want to make sure that every viewer, no matter their means, is able to participate in some fashion," she said. Showdowns are designed so everyone can contribute, she added, while viewers who want to financially support a creator can have a larger impact on the outcome.

YouTube is also expanding Watch With, which allows creators to react to and provide commentary around other content on the platform. The idea addresses another problem Macdonald said YouTube frequently hears from creators curious about livestreaming: They simply don't know what they'd do once the camera turns on.

By giving them something to react to, YouTube hopes to make that first stream less intimidating. "We're really hoping it will open up the funnel and allow more people to dabble and to try live," Macdonald said.

Featured Video For You Creators Taryn Delanie Smith and Kay Poyer on the insecurity no one talks about after going viral What happens when viewers become stakeholders?

Creator and conservationist Maya Higa already knows what can happen when a livestream audience is given something to do. Higa began streaming in 2019, the same year she started bringing the wildlife education work she'd previously done in person as a zookeeper online. She quickly realized livestreaming allowed her to reach far more people without transporting animals to schools, birthday parties, and other events.

In 2021, she founded Alveus Sanctuary, a nonprofit wildlife sanctuary and conservation education center that isn't open to the general public. Instead, viewers can visit virtually through cameras livestreaming from its animal enclosures around the clock.

And the community doesn't just watch. Alveus is funded in large part through crowdsourced donations. Higa said her community has helped build the sanctuary from the beginning, creating a relationship she describes differently from a typical creator-fan dynamic.

"Not only are they a part of building it — I mean, they did build it," Higa told Mashable. "That also makes them stakeholders in it in an interesting way."

Sometimes that participation is financial. Alveus auctions paintings made by its animal ambassadors. Viewers can donate to activate an automated feeder that dispenses treats to the sanctuary's cow and herd of emus. Another feature lets them turn on a splash pad for the emus. Fans who send toys or enrichment items to Alveus can later watch the animals encounter them on the sanctuary's livestreams.

"I guess by definition, it is a little bit transactional, but it's never felt that way," Higa said. "It just feels really good and really special. It feels like we're all doing it together."

But money isn't the only way Alveus has figured out how to turn viewers into participants. Higa recently launched a citizen-science project around the sanctuary's pollinator garden. A pan-tilt-zoom camera lets viewers search the garden for insects and other pollinators, submit their observations, collect points and stickers, and compete on a leaderboard.

"It's kind of like playing Pokémon," Higa joked. Except that the Pokémon are real, and the observations could potentially become useful scientific data.

SEE ALSO: Google wants you to listen to coral reefs. It just might help restore them.

The idea came to Higa after attending an invertebrate conference where she heard about a citizen-science project that had collected roughly 400 observations from members of the public. Alveus, she realized, routinely has between 1,000 and 2,000 concurrent viewers watching its live cameras. "We could get 400 observations in half a day," she recalled thinking.

On the viewer's end, it's effectively a game. On Alveus' end, Higa hopes the project can generate information on which pollinators visit which plants at different points in the year and eventually share that data with conservationists.

"Our community is so invested in what we're doing, they always want to do something," she said. "They really want to make an impact, and they want to be involved in any way they can."

Livestreaming is increasingly global, too

YouTube's ambitions for Live don't stop at getting more people to participate. It also wants creators' communities to cross borders more easily.

Macdonald said more than 40 percent of watch time on YouTube Live comes from viewers outside a creator's home region. Now the company is piloting Auto-Dubbing for Live, an extension of the Gemini-powered technology it already uses to translate uploaded videos into other languages. Since launching in 2023, YouTube's existing auto-dubbing system now supports 27 languages.

For live video, translated audio will be made available as a separate audio track that viewers can select in the YouTube player while a broadcast is happening. Doing that in real time presents a much harder technical problem than dubbing a finished video, particularly when livestream conversations move quickly. Macdonald said YouTube's infrastructure team is working to deliver the translated audio with the low-latency live video required.

Higa sees the potential for conservation, a subject whose audience is inherently global, but she's also more cautious about what technology can replicate. Her ideal, she said, would be growing Alveus' education team to include educators from different parts of the world who can speak directly to audiences in their own languages.

"There are things that they understand and things that they could say in a language that I could never convey auto-dubbed," she said.

A viewer, a fan, or something else?

The question at the center of YouTube's new features is one that livestreamers have been navigating for years: How much agency should an audience have? YouTube's answer increasingly seems to be: quite a lot.

Showdowns allow audiences to influence a competition. Watch With turns watching someone else's content into a communal event. Smart matching is designed to put previously separate creator communities in the same room. Fan-funding products allow viewers to financially affect what's happening on screen. Auto-Dubbing could eventually allow those communities to form across languages.

But Higa's experience with Alveus suggests the most meaningful outcome of all that participation might be harder for a platform to quantify.

Since Higa began streaming in 2019, she estimates her platform has generated around $8 million in crowdsourced and other fundraising. She's also watched members of her audience decide to study environmental science or conservation biology and pursue careers dedicated to the planet. That experience has changed how she thinks about the people on the other side of the screen.

"I never say fans," Higa said. "I sometimes say viewers. I almost always say our community."

Some have been watching her since 2019. They've grown up alongside one another. Higa has watched their interests, values, and even career paths change. "It does feel like a movement of these young people that are growing up together," she said.

And that might be the more interesting bet behind YouTube's latest updates to Live. The platform doesn't need to teach viewers how to participate in livestreams. They've been doing that for years. The opportunity is figuring out what creators and their audiences can build once they do.

From YouTubers and TikTok stars to streamers and podcasters, Mashable talks to creators about how they built their platforms, the gear they swear by, and the trends they see coming next. Read more of our creator coverage, sign up for our Trending Now and Top Stories newsletters or get Mashable push alerts to discover the internet's most exciting voices.

Raspberry Pi has always been associated with tinkering, modification, and making hardware do things it wasn’t designed to do. Now, the company has publicly confirmed that it has been quietly locking its boards to factory-configured RAM capacities through firmware. So, if you were planning a RAM swap—whether for a repair or an upgrade, the message is now on the record: it won’t work.

TL;DR: Physical preorders for Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake are already $10 off at Amazon. Preorder for $59.99 and get a pre-order price guarantee.

Opens in a new window Credit: Nintendo The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time $59.99
$69.99 Save $10.00   Pre-order Here

We're edging closer and closer to the Nintendo Switch 2 remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The official release date is Nov. 5, but Zelda fans are already buzzing thanks to the first-look gameplay footage.

Preorders for both the digital and physical copies are already available at Amazon. The digital version costs $59.99, while the physical edition was initially priced at $69.99 but has been reduced to $59.99 — great news for those of us who prefer to have the actual game in our hands.

There's another good reason to order from Amazon, as the retailed is offering a pre-order price guarantee. That means if the pre-order changes between now and when you're charged, you'll pay the lowest price point between when you order and when you receive the game.

If you're a serious Zelda fan, it's worth getting that preorder in soon.

Nintendo has revealed that the first print run of the physical edition will come with "special packaging that features textured foil cover art." That's one for the collectors, who will also love the Legend of Zelda-themed hardware coming this fall to mark the franchise's 40th anniversary. That will include a special-edition Switch 2 console, a Pro Controller, and a carrying case, all out Oct. 29.

The best deals this week, hand-picked by our shopping experts

• Apple iPhone 18 Pro — free at T-Mobile 

• Paramount+ — $0.99 for 2 months with code p2mcs26prem

• Apple AirPods Pro 3 — $199 $249 (save $50)

• Apple iPad Pro — $1,899 $2,099 (save $200)

• TCL 85-Inch Class QM8L Series TV — $2,497.99 $3,999.99 (save $1,502)