With election season reaching a fever pitch, YouTube wants to make sure its creators have a place to film their political discourse.
The Google-owned company said on Tuesday that it will be adding election-themed sets to its YouTube Space LA and YouTube Space New York studios. In Los Angeles, creators will have a chance to film at a 360-degree Oval Office set, or news desk, press briefing room and polling station setups. New York will get an Oval Office, White House press room and debate stage setups.
YouTube Spaces are studios in Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, New York, Sao Paulo, Berlin, Mumbai, Paris and Toronto that are free to use for digital video creators with a certain size following, usually at least 10,000 subscribers. The studios also offer workshops, classes and equipment for people to use.
Viewers have watched more than 110 million hours of election-themed materials on YouTube during the 2016 election cycle. The platform has also live streamed the debates and the Republican and Democratic national conventions.
To further help YouTube creators who want to create political videos, YouTube New York will offer classes with filmmaker Morgan Spurlock and film production company Warrior Poets to help them learn how to cover election issues. Los Angeles participants will have a comedy writing class focused on independent comedies and real-life formats.
The political sets are not meant to be permanent and will be removed in November.
