If you're a YouTube Premium subscriber, you get access to upcoming (and still experimental) features before the company releases them for everyone. One of the latest additions to the experimental features list is support for video downloads on desktop, offering the same offline playback opportunity that has been available on mobile for quite a while.
YouTube has been making moves in recent weeks to eliminate music bots from the online service. Not long ago, YouTube forced the Groovy Discord music bot to go off-line. After successfully driving that bot away, YouTube is now setting its sights on Rythm. For those unfamiliar, Rythm is a bot allowing Discord users to play music from YouTube videos.
If we're looking at monthly average time per user, and we're watching the USA and UK first, TikTok just surpassed YouTube. Video viewing time changed the way social media was handled, and while YouTube was (and remains) the defacto go-to name for video online, TikTok's meteoric rise reached YouTube levels for the first time over the past half-year. The year 2020 contributed to the most giant growth in use of social apps in recent recorded history - not least of all because users wanted to watch videos while sitting at home.
The annual Minecraft celebration known as Minecraft Live has been given a date and a time for the year 2021. This year's Minecraft Live will once again be exclusively live streamed - not an in-person event - and it'll appear on Minecraft's official webpage and the Minecraft YouTube channel. Minecraft Live will take place on October 16, and we'll see a bunch of new content and have the opportunity to do a "community vote" to choose which new mob is released in the game.
The Pokemon Company International announced a celebratory release of a new episodic animated series this week. They've titled it Pokemon Evolutions, and it's set to celebrate the Pokemon franchise's 25th anniversary. Unlike basically every other Pokemon show ever released, this 8-episode series will include "all known regions of the Pokemon world explored in the core video game franchise."
After many months of waiting, many iPhone users can now use YouTube's picture-in-picture feature through the platform's app, eliminating the need to open a video in Safari to use the PiP mode. The feature was promised earlier this year after users complained that they could only access the feature if they signed up for Premium.
The irony hasn't escaped most people's attention that Google's wearable platform doesn't have an app for Google's music streaming service. Adding insult to injury, Google did launch a YouTube Music app for smartwatches but only for Apple's smartwatches. At long last, a Wear OS version of that app has finally been announced and has started rolling out, but it still won't placate Wear OS owners because it will only serve the few dozen new owners of the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 series.
There's no lack of Discord music bots out there - bots that you can add to a server that will then play music in voice channels - but unfortunately, Google is shutting down one of the most popular bots around. Groovy Bot, which often pulls songs from YouTube to play them in Discord, has received a cease and desist letter from Google and will shut down as a result. The shutdown will happen next week, so if you're a Groovy Bot user, you've only got a few days left with the service.
YouTube Premium, the service that you likely see blasted across the app multiple times a day, now has a new promotion that encourages users to give Stadia Pro a try. Premium subscribers who have never previously signed up for Stadia Pro can get three months of free access to the cloud gaming service.
Yesterday, Nintendo announced a new Indie World Showcase that will show off a slate of indie games headed to the Switch. The show will likely provide us with updates on indie games that have already been announced for the platform on top of revealing new indie games for the first time. There are a couple of different ways to tune in, and we've got them listed for you right here in this article.
The next Indie World Showcase will be happening today at 9 AM PDT/12 PM EDT, which is just about 40 minutes from the time of this writing. The easiest way to catch it is by watching the YouTube live stream we've embedded below when the time comes. Nintendo will also be streaming the Indie World Showcase on its Twitch channel, so Twitch fans can head over there to watch it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDclD1QMmYM
Nintendo says that the Showcase will last for around 20 minutes, so this is a bit shorter than some of the Nintendo Directs and Indie World Showcases we've seen recently. However, as we said yesterday, Nintendo tends to make rapid-fire announcements during these shows, so knowing the running time before it premieres doesn't give us a complete picture of what's in store.
It's also worth reminding any particularly eager Nintendo fans that we're not going to see appearances from any of Nintendo's big franchises here. Instead, these Showcases are strictly about the indie gaming scene on the Switch, so don't expect any surprise announcements about Nintendo's own properties.
With that said, some of the games we'd like to updates on include Bear & Breakfast, Axiom Verge 2, and Hollow Knight: Silksong. We'll see if we learn more about any of those games soon enough, and of course, we'll have all the major announcements for you right here at SlashGear.
There's a new YouTube Music app coming to Wear OS devices that'll make said devices into mobile music monsters. In the past we had MP3 players - little iPods, Zune, and so forth that we'd strap to our arm and connect to our heads with wired earbuds when we went for a run. Now, with an app like YouTube Music (with a YouTube Music Premium subscription) there's a way to download music "for ad-free offline listening" without a mobile connection or connection to a smartphone.
Google has announced a variety of new digital tools and changes to products designed to better protect young users while they're online. The announcement comes only days after Apple revealed its controversial decision to proactively check images on users' devices to detect harmful content and help prevent the exploitation of minors.