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Twitter is making live video quality better by removing one feature

Twitter is making live video quality better by removing one feature

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You won’t be able to invite friends to join your broadcasts via audio before they start

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter announced Tuesday that it’s dropping a feature from its live broadcasts tool, but the company is removing it in service of making your video broadcast quality better.

What’s gone? Now, you aren’t able to invite guests to join you in a broadcast via audio ahead of going live. That feature was added in March 2020. Now, when you go live, your broadcast will just feature you and whoever else happens to be in the frame, though people can still post in the chat or tap to add a heart to interact with you while you’re broadcasting.

Although Twitter says the change is intended to improve video quality, it’s also worth noting that Twitter has another feature for shared live audio: its Clubhouse-like Spaces offering. Spaces seem to have caught on more than what Twitter live video used to let you do, so perhaps the company thought it would be redundant to offer both and is focusing on the feature that seems to have more traction.

The change also follows another to improve video quality on the platform: in September, it announced that new videos posted to the platform would be less pixelated. I haven’t noticed a drastic difference yet, but I’ll take any improvement Twitter can make.