Have something you need to broadcast to the Twitter masses? Be prepared to pay up.In a post from the @Live X account, the company said, “Starting soon, only Premium subscribers will be able to live stream (create live video streams) on X. This includes going live from an encoder with X integration.” In other words, you must be a paid Premium user to use the site’s live service.
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X didn’t give an exact date for when it will start charging for live streams; the site’s help page doesn’t mention needing a premium account and says: “You can easily create live videos to share what’s happening live from your X account.”As Engadget notes, the move will make X the only social network that charges for live capabilities since you can go live for free on various sites, from Twitch to TikTok.Typically, when a company puts a previously free feature behind a paywall, there’s an offer of additional capabilities or a reason for the change. In this case, X hasn’t explained the decision. But it’s not the first time X has done this under owner Elon Musk. Blue checkmarks, for example, now require a premium subscription, while Musk has even floated the idea of paying to tweet.
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X Premium subscriptions currently start at $3 a month for the company’s “Basic” tier and scale up to $8 a month for Premium and $16 a month for Premium+. The basic paid version allows users to edit a post up to 30 minutes after posting, create longer posts, upload videos up to 3 hours long, and download videos on the platform, among other features. Premium subscribers also get access to X’s Media Studio to monitor the popularity of their posts, as well as the ability to make money off what they post through a cut of ad revenue. Perhaps most importantly, Premium subscribers get that blue checkmark beside their name (whether you like it or not). Premium+ subscribers also gain access to X’s AI-powered chatbot Grok and can publish long-form articles on the site, among other features.
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