Adding a YouTube channel is close enough to the Twitch flow that most of the setup carries over. The differences are worth knowing before you wonder why an alert did not arrive when you expected it.
Setting it up
/notif youtube add
Give it the channel URL rather than the display name. Display names are not unique on YouTube, and the URL removes the guesswork entirely.
Livestreams and uploads are separate events
A YouTube channel produces two kinds of thing worth announcing, and most servers only want one of them:
- Livestreams, which behave like Twitch alerts. Someone goes live, a message posts.
- Uploads, which fire whenever a video is published. On an active channel that is several times a week.
Turn uploads on deliberately. A channel that posts daily shorts will fill an alert channel faster than anyone expects.
Scheduled premieres
A premiere is announced ahead of time and then goes live at a set moment. The alert fires when it actually starts, not when it is scheduled, which is usually what people want but occasionally surprises someone who scheduled a premiere for 3am and expected a heads-up the day before.
Latency
YouTube notifies via a subscription feed rather than a live socket, so alerts land within a couple of minutes rather than instantly. If you are running a countdown in chat, build in the slack.