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A bunch of startups & established companies have gotten into ‘live’ streaming of late & Google’s Online video platform, YouTube, wasn’t one to be left out. YouTube’s CEO just announced on industry conference VidCon that you can now use their app to easily & quickly live stream video from a smartphone.
Actually, this is not news in a media sector that has seen most media platforms & social networks follow the pioneering steps of Meerkat, which got the ball rolling last year, although Periscope was the 1st really successful player & then other even bigger players followed, like Twitter or Facebook.
With YouTube, the focus to garner eyeballs to their new live streaming offering appears to be different from their competitors. YouTubers tend to follow a lot more artists & content creators, where platforms like Facebook or Twitter are more about relationships between online friends & acquaintances, which potentially might lead to much wider audiences.
The capability is soon being rolled out in beta. 1st you’ll need to confirm that your YouTube channel is verified & in good standing, then by clicking on a capture button you can start live streaming, select a thumbnail photo while broadcasting to fans & do some real time chatting. YouTube will also provide for live streaming the same kind of capabilities it already has on its existing platform, like search, recommendations on comments & playlists.
YouTube’s existing video infrastructure goes beyond the offering of its competitors, which should make for a faster & more reliable platform for live streaming. It will be interesting to see if Google’s lack of its own successful social network might encumber it against competitors or if its discoverability & huge existing installed base will be enough to overcome this problem. YouTube is also throwing tons of money to the effort of making the platform successful by paying celebs & news organizations to provide ‘live’ Content.
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