YouTube Live

Overview

By choosing YouTube as your streaming platform, note that your webinar will also be automatically posted in your YouTube channel, and thus publicly accessible to your subscribers and anyone with the video link.

While we strongly recommend our in-house WebinarJam Live streaming solution for a smoother user experience, should you opt to use YouTube as your streaming platform, there are a few steps you will need to undertake in your YouTube account to activate the streaming capabilities.

Before you begin

Unfortunately, YouTube requires that all the setup steps described in this article must be followed or else you will see a “connection error” message while trying to connect your YouTube account.  So, please make sure to follow this guide all the way through!

Alright, let’s start!

Enabling the required features

Make sure you are logged out of any other Google accounts, G-Suite, YouTube account, etc, and visit http://www.youtube.com/features and enable Default Features, and Features that Require Phone Verification.

Here comes the tricky part: enabling Monetization! Click to close the features window, and in the sidebar click the $ icon. You might actually find that your account in ineligible!

You see, YouTube’s rules for integration have changed over the years. As it stands now, users must enable Monetization before they can enable Live Streaming. The problem is that for newer accounts, YouTube has some minimum levels before they become eligible to monetize their channels.

At the time of writing this article, here are the minimum levels required by YouTube:

Note that for some older accounts, YouTube might have grandfathered your account and ignore these minimum levels. Indeed, YouTube’s policies are strange!

Anyway, once Monetization, and Live Streaming are enabled in your account, YouTube approval process will finally kick in. Note that this process will take up to 24 hours.

 

Checking Default Upload Settings

It is important that any YouTube subscribers you have do not see your test webinars, or watch webinars outside of the WebinarJam experience. So you may want to change your default privacy setting to “Unlisted”.

Return to your settings by clicking the gear icon. Then select “Upload defaults” from the sidebar. Here (as shown below) you can change the Privacy setting to “Unlisted” from the dropdown. This means that every Live streaming you do will be unlisted. But you can change it as necessary.

Test Your Webinar Settings

Run the webinar as you normally would inside your WebinarJam live room. Then, in another browser, login as an attendee.

If you see your test video, then all is well with your account.

If your video shows the following error, “Watch this video on YouTube. Playback on other websites has been disabled by the video owner” your YouTube account is not properly configured yet.

 

So, if it’s not working, there are a few things to do…

Change Channels

Confirm that you are using the same channel as you have your webinar content on. You may need to associate this channel with your main Google account.

Contact YouTube Support

If you perform all of the above steps and are still getting the video embed error, then please contact YouTube’s support team directly at https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3545535.

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YouTube Configuration Error

If, while in the process of accessing your WebinarJam live room, you get the error message “YouTube Configuration Error” as displayed below, then something in your YouTube connection is not correct.

Please be sure you are logged into the same YouTube account that is displayed on your Connect YouTube screen. Your account email will appear in small writing below the YouTube icon.

Then you will want to confirm that the settings on your YouTube account are correct as explained above in this article. Once you’ve made sure those settings are indeed correct, please go back to your Webinar presenter’s link and retry.