Guide To Executing The Perfect YouTube Premiere
Towing the line between a traditional YouTube video and a live stream, a YouTube premier can be a great way for you and your fans to experience a new video together, and generate excitement around your new content. Here, we breakdown how to execute the perfect YouTube premiere.
Guest post by Randi Zimmerman of the Symphonic Blog
YouTube Premieres are essentially a mix between traditional YouTube videos and a live stream. It lets you and your viewers watch and experience a new video together; just like a movie or TV show premiere. Premiering your video lets you create buzz around the video with a shareable watch page to get it out to as many viewers as possible.
How to Execute the Perfect YouTube Premiere:
With Vevo, you can now set up YouTube premieres for new videos. With this, a watch page will appear for a predetermined amount of time before a video goes live. This shows a count down to the time the video goes live.
Premieres also include a chat feature which allows fans to chat about the upcoming release and gives the artist the opportunity to enter the chat and interact with their fans directly. (Note: This is only available to artists with Official Artist Channels OR artists/channels with 100k+ subscribers.)
How does it work?
Before the premiere starts:
- A public watch page is created. The video will eventually premiere on this watch page, so it will be the same link.
- Viewers who choose to get notifications get a tune-in notification around 30 minutes before the start of your premiere.
- A second notification is sent at the start, letting viewers know the premiere is starting.
- You can interact with your audience in comments and live chat (if eligible). Once a premiere with chat watch page is live, you can enter the chat by logging into your Official Artist Channel YouTube account and going to the video’s watch page URL.
When the premiere starts:
- A countdown will show during the first 2 minutes of the premiere.
- When the countdown is over, viewers watch the video together in real-time.
- Viewers can’t scrub forward, but they can scrub backwards during the stream.
- The concurrent viewers count shows the number of viewers watching.
- You can continue to interact with your audience in comments and live chat (if eligible).
When the premiere is over:
- The video remains on your Vevo channel as a regular upload.
- After the premiere, the countdown won’t be included in your video.
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Learn more:
Everything You Need to Know About YouTube Premieres
Does Your Music Qualify for YouTube’s Content ID?
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To request a YouTube premiere to Symphonic with your Vevo video delivery, you’ll need to meet these criteria:
- Symphonic has to have delivered your video first – which means you have to have submitted a video distribution request with us. (More information here.)
- All premiere requests must be sent to video@symdistro.com at least 72 hours prior to the requested watch page live date.
- Chat availability is limited to artists/channels with 100k + subscribers OR a YouTube Official Artist Channel only.
- Vevo manually schedules watch pages during US & UK business hours only. Therefore, the watch page can only be processed: Monday-Friday between 10am-9pm ET or 10am-6pm GMT. This means your watch page MUST go live during this time frame. The video can premiere at any time.
