YouTube Testing New Live Streaming Platform
YouTube sounds even better live, don't you think?
YouTube has flirted with live streaming on multiple occasions, allowing people to experience U2’s performance from the Rose Bowl in LA, the Indian Premier League and more. Recently, the popular video site has announced that it will start a two-day trial for a live streaming service. The experimental trial will take place with the help of four new media partners Howcase, Next New Networks, Rocketboom and Young Hollywood.
The new platform will integrate live streaming directly into YouTube channels. Broadcasters will be able to make use of a webcam, digital cam or camcorder to stream content live to channels. So as you can see, it doesn’t take a lot of tricky hardware to be able to stream content live to your channel. A digital camera that’s connectable through USB or FireWire is more than enough. The trial for the new YouTube service began on Monday and it’s expected to grow considerably across the site in the future.
YouTube’s product manager Josh Siegel has actually declared that the trial is just a first step. After offering multiple events live including President Barrack Obama’s first State of the Union address, YouTube is now moving on to actually including live streaming in its services. For all of the previous events, the site had to rely on third-party technology to be able to offer the live webcasts. Now YouTube has serious plans. “We’re going to look at a whole bunch of data about the performance of our new platform and then, based on that, make decisions about how we’ll open it up, with the goal of opening it up to all of our partners over time” Siegel mentioned.
According to another YouTube manager (product marketing), Chris Hamilton, live streaming is the natural evolution to online video. Hamilton believes that live streaming adds an extra level of engagement for the site’s users. Really? I personally wouldn’t mind being able to experience live concerts and events worldwide and I can’t think of any YouTube user who wouldn’t fancy that. This would give a whole new meaning for the casual user who posts vids on YouTube in order to show them to friends.
While other sites have implemented live streaming long before YouTube, Google’s video site is clearly the largest on the web. So it doesn’t really matter how well implemented the technology is on other sites, YouTube already has a huge number of users who’d love to try live streaming out and probably wouldn’t migrate to other (smaller) websites just for the sake of web cast. The main point now is for YouTube to monitor the trial, analyze how well the videos look and determine whether servers can properly handle bandwidth increase (if any is recorded).
Youtube has even included an interactive schedule for all of the live broadcasts, which you can find here. Just leave it to Google and its various branches to keep growing and offering new and improved services to all Internet users worldwide.
