YouTube Gaming—Google’s Twitch.tv competitor—launches tomorrow

One year and one day after Google lost Twitch.tv to Amazon, YouTube Gaming is going public. Starting tomorrow, users can head down to http://gaming.youtube.com (or download the app) to check out the new interface, see who's streaming, or start a stream themselves. We went hands-on with a pre-release version of YouTube shortly after the June announcement, and very soon the site will be ready for public consumption.

YouTube calls YouTube Gaming the "go-to destination for anything and everything gaming." It not only shows who is live streaming, but serves as a collection point for all gaming content on YouTube. YouTube Gaming automatically categorizes YouTube's gaming content and sorts it by game and by the content of video. This allows users to easily see the most popular content for their favorite game.

A beta version of the new live streaming dashboard is also launching tomorrow. The new dashboard makes streaming less of a scheduled event and more of a casual thing that streamers can do whenever they want. Streaming on YouTube Gaming is done on HTML5, and, unlike Twitch, streamers can enable a "DVR Mode" that buffers the last four hours of a stream and allows viewers to rewind.