The platform unveiled “YouTube Live,” a feature that “will offer you an entirely new, more intimate and spontaneous way to share your experiences with your communities.”
YouTube announced the move—and reminded people it offered a live videos before Periscope Facebook Live and Meerkat even existed—in a company blog post:
We’ve been offering live streaming on YouTube since 2011, before it was cool. Millions of people around the world tuned in to watch the Royal Wedding in 2011. One-sixth of the Internet watched Felix Baumgartner leap from space live on YouTube in 2012.
And just this year, we became the first to ever broadcast a 360-degree live stream during Coachella. Over 21 million people tuned in to watch Coachella on YouTube this year—almost twice as many as tuned in to watch the season finale of American Idol.
Today, we are announcing a new chapter in bringing the power of live video to creators everywhere. Soon, we’ll be putting the power of YouTube live streaming in the palm of your hands.
YouTube mobile live streaming will be baked right into the core YouTube mobile app. You won’t need to open anything else, just hit the big red capture button right there in the corner, take or select a photo to use as a thumbnail, and you can broadcast live to your fans and chat in near real time.
Computerworld reported that YouTube Live is a natural extension of Google Hangouts:
Google invented live-streaming video for the masses back in 2011.
It was presented as a feature of Google+, but was really all about YouTube. Called Hangouts On Air, the idea was to live-stream video with up to 10 participants. Unlike regular Hangouts, Hangouts On Air could turn a video chat into a public performance. Hangouts On Air streams could be instantly shared, meaning that you could share it while the video was in progress. After the live stream ended, the video was posted on YouTube for posterity.
There was just one problem: Hangouts On Air was desktop-only, not mobile. As we learned later, the ability to live stream from a phone is the killer feature for live videos.
YouTube Live offers users the features that have made the platform a video haven, along with the eyeballs of its massive audience (1 billion monthly active users):
Because it’s built right into the YouTube app, mobile live streaming will have all the features your regular videos have—you’ll be able to search for them, find them through recommendations and playlists and protect them from unauthorized uses. And since it uses YouTube’s peerless infrastructure, it’ll be faster and more reliable than anything else out there.
YouTube Live launched on June 23 at the 7th annual VidCon with selected power users, including Alex Wassabi and The Young Turks, but is in the process of rolling out to additional users.
Featured live streams are broken into sections such as news, music, gaming, technology and animals—and the company said all live streams have the same recommendations, search features and playlists as the platform’s other videos.
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Though more than 2 million people have already subscribed to the feature, YouTube will have to fight for viewer’s attention. Fortune reported:
YouTube’s move comes at a time when Facebook has also been touting the power of its live streaming service, Facebook Live. During the recent House of Representatives Democratic protest over gun control measures, cable TV stations weren’t able to broadcast the protests but several congresspeople used Facebook Live and Periscope to live stream the events.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday morning that the Facebook Live broadcasts were viewed more than 3 million times.
Once YouTube does open its mobile live streaming feature more broadly, it will have to prove that it can compete with Facebook Live and Twitter’s Periscope. That’s no small feat as both Twitter and Facebook have made it clear that live video are important focuses for both social networks.
However, there are plenty hungry for live videos.
“By 2020, video will account for about 75 [percent] of the world’s mobile traffic, according to an estimate from networking-equipment maker Cisco Systems,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
YouTube will also have the advantage of partnering with Tumblr (another Google-owned platform). On Tuesday afternoon, the blogging site will begin broadcasting live videos from Mashable, The Huffington Post and other publishers.
Tumblr users can then post live streams from supported services—including YouTube Live and YouNow—and share them with their followers. The videos can be reblogged like other Tumblr posts and will be available even after the live stream ends.
The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Facebook Live and Periscope aren’t part of Tumblr’s live-streaming gambit:
It's a departure from other companies, which have created live-streaming services of their own. Instead, Tumblr wants to be a destination for live regardless of where those videos are originally created.
Tumblr is launching its live-streaming efforts with several partners in the space—Kanvas and Upclose are two others—but does not currently support Facebook Live or Twitter's Periscope, two of the larger live-streaming entities.
For brand managers looking to use YouTube Live, Google has a guide to help you start streaming, along with a help page and FAQ section.
from PR Daily News Feed http://ift.tt/28XJe20
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