YouTube has already live streamed a number of popular concerts, sporting events, and interviews, but most were one-time deals. Now Google wants to crank it up a notch, and has announced YouTube Live.
YouTube Live integrates live streaming capabilities and discovery tools directly into the YouTube platform. This means a new YouTube Live browse page at youtube.com/live, where you can always find live events happening on YouTube and add events to your calendar, as well as the ability to subscribe to your favorite YouTube live-streaming partners and be notified of upcoming live streams on your customized homepage.
Today, Google is going to start gradually rolling out its live streaming beta platform, which will allow certain YouTube partners with accounts in good standing to stream live content on YouTube. In the months ahead, the search giant will provide thousands of partners with the capability to live stream from their channels. The feature will thus be rolled out incrementally over time.
YouTube sees 35 hours of video uploaded every minute and well over 2 billion views every day. Both these numbers will undoubtedly continue to grow, but now the company wants to increase traffic with live streaming, a video space it has only dabbled in so far.