Discord begins testing official YouTube integration following music bot shutdowns

In recent weeks, Google/YouTube has been on a mission to take down a number of Discord bots, mainly focusing on music bots that pull audio from YouTube videos and circumvent advertising in order to allow groups to listen together while in a voice channel. Now, Discord is looking to do something about this by testing official YouTube integration. 

A new feature called ‘Watch Together' is being tested in a small number of Discord servers at the moment. This is something that Discord explored back in 2020, but as reported by The Verge, the company has prioritised its development now in the wake of recent music bot shutdowns.

Watch Together on Discord looks similar to streaming/screen-sharing in calls, although there is a side tab where users can paste video links and set up a queue. This works a little differently to Discord's music bots, where you would type a command into a text channel to play or queue a song.

With this official integration, advertisements will be present, which should keep YouTube/Google happy, while also ensuring that this aspect of Discord remains in-tact, without the need for third-party bots. Currently, Watch Together is being tested on the Discord Game Labs server, but it should begin rolling out to all users in late October.

KitGuru Says: I regularly used music bots on Discord during calls with friends, but we would usually have to use a separate site like watch2gether to view video content. Now, Discord seems to be tackling this by introducing official YouTube integration in-app, which should please a lot of users. 

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