According to Android Police, YouTube is testing a feature that displays the number of viewers for a specific video at any given time on their Android video streaming app.
In simple terms, when you watch a video on YouTube, you can now see how many other YouTube users are watching that video at the same time as you, in real-time. It's the view count in real-time, and there's no way to refresh or rewind the video to inflate the view count.
This marks one of the unprecedented experiments on the YouTube app, never seen on any YouTube platform before. For the web platform, especially within the Creator Studio, this feature proves quite useful and meaningful. Users can hope this is the initial step towards enhancing the Creator Studio. For end-users, the feature might be intriguing but lacks practicality.
The real-time view count seems to be a valuable feature under development by content creators. In the not-so-distant future, this feature is expected to be available for all users, but currently, it remains somewhat limited.
After introducing the adjustable video playback speed feature, YouTube's experimentation with displaying the number of viewers for online videos indicates Google's significant focus on their applications on the Android operating system, especially with the upcoming release of their latest Android OS, Android O.
