Things at YouTube are getting very interesting. Their plans for a more channel-based homepage experience, geared toward making the site more television-friendly were unveiled earlier this week.
Now YouTube has announced the launch of YouTube Live, which consists of a new live-streaming platform and a home page for live content on the site. YouTube is now in uStream territory.
YouTube Live will certainly give television watchers much more content to choose from. This has the potential to make TV incredibly social, based on the simple fact that this is YouTube – the mother of all online video.
Imagine going on vacation, streaming live to YouTube from your phone, and letting your friends and family watch it from their TVs. Now imagine being subscribed to all of your friends’ channels and being able to have a similar experience.
I say potential though.This is isn’t possible with YouTube yet, but it would only make sense to become so in the future – at least with private profiles. The public ones may be tough to police. YouTube doesn’t want to fall victim to the pitfalls of Chatroulette. You know what I’m talking about.
“Today, we’ll also start gradually rolling out our live streaming beta platform, which will allow certain YouTube partners with accounts in good standing to stream live content on YouTube,” the company says. “The goal is to provide thousands of partners with the capability to live stream from their channels in the months ahead. In order to ensure a great live stream viewing experience, we’ll roll this offering out incrementally over time.”
The YouTube Live homepage is already up, however. You can go there now and see live video.
“With over 2 billion views a day, it’s easy to think about YouTube as a place to watch videos recorded in the past,” the company says. “But you’ve told us you want more – and that includes events taking place right now.”
As previously reported, Salar Kamangar has been appointed SVP of YouTube and video at Google as part of new CEO Larry Page’s restructuring of management at the company.