YouTube knows that the stars that emerged on phim sez an doits platform are key to its success.
On Thursday, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced a series of new tools and investments in those stars.
Speaking at VidCon, the annual event that attracts thousands of fans as well as a large chunk of the online video industry, YouTube rolled out new community tools, mobile live streaming and a slate of new and renewed original series.
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Wojcicki acknowledged that YouTube faces growing competition, stopping short of calling out Facebook and Snapchat in particular.
"Even though the online video space is more crowded than ever, YouTube continues to thrive," Wojcicki said.
The new features include mobile live streaming, a feature that has recently been embraced by Twitter in Periscope and Facebook with Live. YouTube has broadcast live streams previously, but has not offered the capability to stream live from smartphones.
The tool is available to certain creators immediately and will be more widely available at some point.
Wojcicki focused on what she called "the three Cs": community, creation and creative ambition.
For community, YouTube is rolling out three new tools for video creators. Page operators will now be able to pin to the top of video comments (much like users can already do on Twitter and Facebook feeds), include GIFs in responses to comments and delegate comment moderation to selected fans.
For creation, YouTube has created a new "Creator Hub" to centralize its somewhat disparate video tools.
Sebastien Missoffe, vice president of operations at YouTube, also said that YouTube is making creators a new promise: every creator that has enabled monetization on YouTube will be able to reach out with questions and get a human-generated response within a day.
"From zero subscribers to 10 million subscribers, we want to make the journey clear at every stage and outline the support we offer," he said.
Lastly, on creative ambition, YouTube announced a variety of renewals of original series for its YouTube Red subscription service and some new efforts including one centered on the Step Updance series.
There's also a series coming from education channel V Sauce centered around human behavior and a scripted musical comedy series from Rhett & Link that will include Saturday Night Livealums Molly Shannon and Chris Parnell.
YouTube Red launched in October 2015 in a rollout that announced the video site's entry into premium video as well as its attempts to capitalize on its music library.
Music is one of the bigger subjects not touched on at the keynote.
YouTube has recently emerged as public enemy No. 1 for the music industry, which claims the platform does not adequately compensate rights holders or properly police the site for illegally uploaded music.
YouTube has claimed it returns more money to musicians and labels than any other platform.
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