Google is continuing their push into the live streaming market, today announcing that YouTube now supports live-streaming 720p and 1080p content at the game-friendly frame rate of 60 fps.

While 60 fps live streaming is also supported by the internet's largest streaming site, Twitch, Google improves upon their offering by supporting HTML5 playback. Compared to Flash, which Twitch uses for their streams, HTML5 playback is more efficient and supports variable speed playback, allowing users to rewind while watching a live stream and then catch up at 1.5x or 2x normal speed.

Google is primarily targeting 60 fps live streaming at gamers. The company has worked with two popular game-streaming software developers, Elgato and XSplit, to support 60 fps YouTube streams from within their apps. Other app developers will be able to add in 60 fps live streaming support via a new high frame rate flag in the YouTube API.

The new 60 fps streaming option doesn't affect the latency of a YouTube stream significantly, according to Google. However, as Ars Technica reports, there is currently around 30-60 seconds of lag on YouTube's live streaming platform, which isn't great for interactions between streamers and viewers.

To begin with, YouTube are just supporting desktop playback for 60 fps streams, however the company will add in more platforms in the coming weeks. Google apparently has "plenty left to come" in the streaming space, and that could include a reported re-launch of YouTube Live.