Live Control Room

Everything about a broadcast happens here. Before going live you set the title, thumbnail, visibility and monetisation, copy the stream key into your encoder, and watch the health readout to see whether your upload is keeping pace. Once you are on air it becomes an operating desk: concurrent viewers, chat moderation, ad breaks, polls, and the button that ends it. YouTube can also generate a vertical layout from a horizontal stream in here, so the same broadcast becomes eligible for the Shorts feed without a second encoder, and both versions share one chat.