Today YouTube announced YouTube Live, where you can watch and discover live streaming shows and events. YouTube Live (www.youtube.com/live) is not yet available to all publishers, only those YouTube partners with accounts in good standing can push streaming content. Our sources who have been testing the platform before its public release tell us that the video tools provided by YouTube are very good. It’s surprising it took this long for Google to bring live streaming accessibility to the public (well, some of the public—and I know they’ve streamed live events before), but given YouTube’s 2 billion views a day, I’m sure they’ll do a good job creating a scalable platform to support the mass amount of internet whores that want to hand out their crappy opinions.
The success of YouTube Live is going to come down to content. I can’t see myself watching anything live unless the content is compelling enough that I need to see it when it happens—I can’t think of anything like this except for maybe a sports game. American Idol fans would like that too if it was available. But the existing YouTube Live lineup does not have primetime shows. My opinion will change if amateur content producers learn to create quality content and subject matter, but when YouTube Live turns into the flooded circus that YouTube already is (and it will), I’ll wait until CS posts the video and watch it here. We’re going to need top-notch video discovery tools for the masses to buy into live video.
[via: YouTube Blog]
