New: Video Tips. Your Viewers Can Now Play a YouTube Clip on Your Stream (August 2026)

What shipped

• A Video tab on the tip page. Paste a YouTube link (watch, youtu.be, or Shorts), see the title, thumbnail, and exactly how long it will play at that amount, then pay with UPI.
• A Video play time ladder in Tip Page → Settings: base seconds at your floor, more from two higher amounts, up to five minutes. Defaults are 15 / 30 from ₹500 / 60 from ₹1,000.
• A Video row in "Media supporters can attach" with its own toggle and rupee floor (default ₹200).
• An on-stream alert with the supporter's name and amount, the video, and a blue progress line that fills over the play window. It clears on its own, earlier if the clip is shorter.
• Videos follow the approve uploads rule, so they wait in your Live Alerts approval queue (or Discord / Telegram) with a thumbnail, title link, and play time before they play.
• Private, age-restricted, non-embeddable, and not-yet-started videos are refused before payment, with a one-line reason the supporter can act on.

How it works in sixty seconds

1. A viewer opens your tip page, types ₹500, taps Video, and pastes a Short.
2. The page shows the thumbnail and "Plays for 30s on stream". They pay with Google Pay.
3. The tip lands in your Live Alerts queue. You, or a moderator on Discord, glance at the thumbnail and tap approve.
4. On stream: "Rahul donated ₹500", the video, the blue line filling underneath. Thirty seconds later it fades and the next alert plays.
5. ₹500 is in your bank account. No commission was taken.

Why

Media share is the most clippable donation there is: a payment becomes a shared moment, the streamer reacts, and the reaction becomes tomorrow's Short. Until now the tools that offered it did not take UPI and did take a cut. This one runs through your own tip page, so the tip lands in your account at 0% and the clip plays on any platform you stream to. It is the same idea as GIF, voice, and sound tips: give the supporter a way to be part of the show, and give you the dials.

Pricing play time by amount was the design decision I cared most about. A flat "₹200 unlocks 30 seconds" leaves money on the table; a ladder that says "₹500 buys 30 seconds" right there on the page lets supporters choose the upsell themselves, and they do.

Off by default, and the settings I would start with

Nothing changes on your tip page until you switch Video on. When you do:

• Set the floor above your GIF price. ₹200 is the default and a sensible start for most channels.
• Keep the default ladder for a week, then adjust. Most streamers shorten the top tier rather than lengthen it.
• Leave approval on. It covers images, voice notes, sounds, and videos in one switch.
• Add three lines to your welcome message: no full songs, chat rules apply on screen, shorter is funnier.
• Test with a ₹1 floor and a Short to yourself, then put the real floor back.

The setup guide is the full click path, including the OBS side and a troubleshooting table, and the moderation playbook covers rules, copyright, and the clips that land.

Also in this release: read-aloud fixes

Two things were wrong with read-aloud tips and both are fixed.

• Phone-notification tips now speak. Read-aloud used to run only for tips made through the tip page. Tips that arrive through your phone's Google Pay, PhonePe, or Paytm notifications were never sent to the voice engine, so the message was shown but not spoken. They are now, on every path.
• The voice engine moved to Sarvam's newer model. Sarvam retired the model we launched on, which had silently stopped read-aloud for a couple of weeks. Any voice you had picked was mapped to the closest new one automatically, so nothing needs re-saving. If read-aloud had gone quiet for you, that was why.

One side effect worth knowing: a phone-notification tip with read-aloud on now appears a few seconds after the payment notification rather than instantly, because the audio is generated first so it can play with the alert.

What I am watching next

The first week of real video tips will decide the defaults. If the queue is mostly Shorts, the base window may drop to 10 seconds; if approval turns out to be a bottleneck for solo streamers, a trusted-supporter list that skips it is the obvious next step. Tell me what you see on Discord.

Full details: how video tips work and how they compare to Streamlabs and StreamElements media share.