YouTube Rolls Out New Live Streaming Platform to all who are currently enabled to stream live.
**** See update below****
Live Streaming Specialist from the YouTube support blog announced yesterday "We are working on improving the YouTube Live experience and are now excited to roll it out to all accounts that are currently enabled for YouTube Live!"
If you are currently enabled to stream live, like many revenue producing YouTube Partners and non-profits are, you will see the following opt-in message from your Video Manager Live Events section.
As I mentioned some specifics in a previous post - there are considerable benefits of using the new platform. Especially with how YouTube utilizes transcoding. Instead of streaming up to four separate bit rates to the media servers - YouTube now allows a single ingest stream of one higher bitrate, up to 6Mbps - 1080p, which it will then transcodes to lower bitrates including to mobile devices. Overall this saves you upload bandwidth and encoding CPU.
Some other neat functions of the new platform are the use of viewer selected cameras called multi-camera events. Think of watching a live stream of a concert and clicking on the camera behind the drummer. Or maybe watching a presentation and clicking the camera with slides only. I can think of lots of uses for this.
The user selected camera is placed above the player:
The live stream can be 'recorded' on the server and the archive is available very rapidly after the live event concludes. Ideally you maintain the same live event URL for your archive with the comments and viewer count intact.
You can even implement a DVR function in case a viewer arrives late - they can scrub backwards in time to see what they have missed.
YouTube has a lot of ground to cover to catch up with mature live streaming services such as Livestream or Ustream but it's apparent they are making tracks. Some of that ground includes enabling live streaming to more partners - which they say will continue to be offered.
Check out YouTube's Live Streaming Guide for the details.
If you would like to keep up with YouTube live streaming then join:
Google+ Communities
Or
YouTube Live Streaming LinkedIn Group
and follow:
@mxpi on Twitter
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<UPDATE>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
On May 15th, 2013 Google announced 'YouTube live streaming expanding to more channels'. Any channel with over 1000 subscriptions would be eligible to apply for the Live Events feature of streaming video live on YouTube.
The YouTube Live Support group verified the announcement with further instruction of how to apply for live streaming on YouTube.
This announcement is historic in the live streaming industry. Any channel with over 1000 subscriptions is probably in the top 10% of all YouTube channels. However those content producers probably distribute to over 80% of viewers. So this announcement effectively opens up live streaming to most content distributors. This is the announcement that everyone following YouTube live streaming has been waiting for. It opens up the accessibility of a free content delivery network and will shift many over to YouTube live streaming platform - especially for those that already use YouTube for video on demand hosting.
But it also creates an application mechanism - which had not existed before except to non-profits. This gives YouTube the knowledge of who wants to stream live.
It may also create more on-demand content and more channels. There will be many whose focus is on live streaming content and not necessarily video on demand. Those live producers have never considered YouTube until now. This gives them motivation to create a channel and gain subscribers to become eligible for live streaming.
However, we are still waiting - if you are eligible, and after you apply it still takes time to actually become enabled - "Once you’ve applied, access to live will be granted gradually.''
