Peloton appears to have unveiled a new feature for instructors to utilize while teaching live classes: high-fives.
Multiple instructors, while teaching live classes on Thursdays, have remarked that they now have the ability to give out high fives to members.
Historically, instructors have been able to filter through different views of their leaderboard. This includes those in studio, those with milestones and birthday, and the entire leaderboard. The instructors use these to verbally give shoutouts during class.
However, now in addition to just seeing the names and outputs on the leaderboard – it appears the instructors now have the ability to click on a username and send out a high five to any user they want while teaching a live class. Prior to this week, this was not something they had the ability to do.
In a class early this morning, Jess Sims implied this was related to birthdays, however, Marcel Dinkins later seemed to indicate that they could give these high fives to any member they wanted to. Given instructors typically have the leaderboard filtered to those with milestones & birthdays (or in studio) – we can imagine most high fives would go out to those with milestones.
This triggers a high-five notification to the member on their device. It appears in the high-fives section on the left-hand side of the screen, just as all other high-fives would. The high-five specifically states it is from the instructor. There is also a special checkmark icon on the instructor name to indicate the significance of this.
However, there appear to be some quirks with the feature indicating that Peloton may still be working on it. For example, in this morning’s class, while some members received a high-five with Jess’ name attached, others received a high-five with no name attached. It is likely that the feature is still being rolled out and tested, as it is not yet available in every class and does not appear uniformly for all members.
This new feature is likely designed to provide instructors with an additional way to recognize members in live classes. It seems likely this feature may not be heavily used on the Row, since instructors will have their hands on the rowing handle for most of the class.
It’s also not clear how much instructors will use this feature, once the newness wears off. It is likely easier to verbally give shoutouts, than to be clicking on names on the screen – particularly while trying to run. However, this might allow instructors to recognize more members – by clicking on names to give them high fives, without having to verbally say as many names.
One question is whether this, long term, could lead to less shoutouts being given, since instructors can now recognize members via high fives while teaching.
This is the second new feature related to shoutouts / milestones, and more in recent months. Peloton has also begun testing automatically emailing video clips of shoutouts to some members who receive them.
What do you think of this new feature? Would you be excited to receive a high-five from an instructor in a live class?
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