This is an obvious thing for them to do, but the surprising part about it to me is that half the time youtube is too slow to play a video clip I choose. It's very unreliable, so it will be interesting to see how well the streams work.
Similarly awful is (usually) my youtube experience over DSL :(
However: just now watching eyepatchentertainment's test broadcast I find it remarkable. Sharp picture. Perfectly synced sound. Smooth scroll of live comments. Unknown fps, but it has no jerkiness to video.
I worry for what this will do re" jacquesm's ww.com.
Looks like youtube-live will be setting the standard for streaming vid.
Have you ever noticed that you never have a problem playing ads, but yet the video following the ad doesn't work half the time? That's one thing that's irked me about youtube for a while.
Until I ran a browser (Chrome, or it might have been Safari) that didn't have AdBlockPlus installed, I had actually never seen a video ad on YouTube that wasn't part of the video being watched (i.e. a pre-roll ad). I didn't find out that they had implemented this until about 2 months ago.
I don't run an ad blocker because I feel like watching/viewing an ad is the least I can do to support a free site. Just to be clear, I'm not condemning you for using an ad blocker, to each his own, just clarifying why I do see the ads.
That said, I still think it's crazy that the quality of service for Youtube's ads seems to be a priority over the actual video.
YouTube uses some kind of bursting heuristic that is marginal in certain scenarios.
What it does is it loads the first chunk of a request to start playing with high bandwidth, but it then throttles the connection to approximately the bitrate of the video stream. The idea is that YouTube reduces the costs (bandwidth, CPU, routing etc.) of transferring bits that are never actually consumed, because the user stopped watching the video before it finished playing.
The quickest way to get a YouTube video is to download it with a download manager that sends multiple requests. Those requests ought to trigger the initial burstiness, and if you have enough of them either the initial burst will be sufficient to cover the whole file or the total bandwidth (even though throttled) across all simultaneous downloads will reach your own download bandwidth.
It often is now the case in the US. A couple years of go YouTube's streaming was pretty much flawless. I don't think they've managed to keep up with demand.
It's definitely the case for Germany. It seems to depend on the particular video, though. I had some videos not loading at all at 360p, while others loaded perfectly fine at 720p.
Yeah I've found the same thing. It must depend on something back end, like the encoding used when the file was uploaded, or whether the servers holding that particular file are busy at the time. It's very frustrating.
I'm in England with ~15mbps down, 1mbps up, never noticed any slow down with Youtube. I can't recall ever not being able to stream without buffering, always been good for me.
I noticed once that my traffic to various geographic locations was being routed through non-obvious other locations first, such as going through Texas to get to California (I'm in Utah). My link to California was saturated, so anything hosted there ran terribly slow. A CDN that uses naive geolocation to select a server might not be aware of these bizarre routing situations, picking a less-than-optimal server.
What's interesting is that they're still only opening it for "partners", so they're not quite taking up the fight with Ustream, justin.tv or Niconicodouga yet.
Think if someone live streamed a suicide or some other horrible thing. On Justin.tv, Ustream that would be horrible enough, but on YouTube it would be a whole other level. I'm surprised it hasn't happened on one of those sites yet actually.
yeah, true -- this is all about scale. They have tons of online content producing partners that will be interested in doing live stuff, and also on the scale side of things, the YouTube reach is immense compared to the DIY streamer sites like justin.tv etc
I'm sure there is a market for this, but it's not me or my demographic. Technical hurdles aside, I tend to trend away from most "live" events. I like the idea of live breaking news. For most things, however I'd rather have them on demand. This is one of the reasons why my wife and I recently canceled cable for Hulu, Netflix and other on demand services.
I don't see myself structuring my day around "Wheezy Live On Youtube"
I agree. I saw ThisWeekIn is scheduled to stream This Week in Startups on Tuesday. I watch the show, but never live.
However, I read rumors on reddit a few weeks ago about YouTube trying to offer NBA and NHL games via live streams. Sports are a different story, for me, and I am willing to pay for access to NHL games. NHL's GameCenter has blackout restrictions that eliminate it as a cable subscription replacement. I know Google won't have that sort of crap, so I'm hopeful for YouTube Live Sports.
Startup Idea - Live streaming where people say what they're going to do, then collect money in escrow before they actually do it. IE: I'll try and do a standing long jump over these ten people if I collect $20.
If they succeed, they get the money. If not, the money get's returned.
Other use cases could be people constantly streaming and having a "hat out" to "throw money" in, akin to street performers.
Cool idea, but I can see it quickly spiraling into -- "watch me jump off my roof and most likely miss this trampoline and hurt myself terribly for $10".
This might affects uStream. It won't affect Justin.tv.
Youtube is only allowing "approved partners" stream video - like NBC, CBS, ABC. For now, it's not some guy live streaming his world of warcraft campaign.
Unfortunately for Justin.tv, those 'approved partners' is also likely the key players where the money is for live events (Olympics, sporting events, etc.).
Starcraft/WoW matches and such will only be so popular.
that's the same language they used for when they started allowing longer video lengths, and I started seeing much longer minecraft videos that day, so it seems like this won't be limited to just big corporate accounts.
Thats the problem with Yahoo. Never enough PR for what they create. If they want something done, you have to publicize it. Sadly, Yahoo is on a downward spiral.
People always asking, what do they do again? They are nerds, but sadly too much management and not enough PR.
I think they may have been a bit ahead of the time here.
One problem with Yahoo is that they aren't able to lay out a vision: here's something cool, and here's why you will like it. Steve Jobs is the gold standard here, of course.
if we're trying to be fair, that wikipedia article alone links to two other live streaming sites that launched before yahoo live. people have been streaming video for a while now :)
They should definitely fix the timezones. Google already know which timezone I'm in (from the ip address, should allow manual override in the preferences) and should use my current location's timezone in the display.
I wonder if Youtube will be competitive and match what other live streaming sites pay their broadcasters for video advertisements? From anecdotal evidence, I know on Justin.tv select broadcasters that stream their Starcraft 2 matches make .002 cents per viewer for each 30 second commercial break, which is not too shabby for simply playing a video game. Most broadcasters that are partners on Justin.tv typically have 2000+ people watching their stream simultaneously.
This is a nice feature, but i don't see how it solves their obvious issues serving out traffic? The past year i've had lots and lots of problems watching media. It will fail in 360p but suddenly work great in 720p (bw-wise), i know a lot of people experience this.
As both a YouTube and Ustream partner, I'm interested in how this could change the advertising revenues for live events. Ustream uses google's adsense, so it would be hard for ustream to match YouTube's ad split.
There are three or four competing HTTP-based non-Flash live streaming protocols duking it out in the IETF. AFAIK Chrome hasn't implemented any of them yet.
There is nothing stopping YouTube from running, say, a RTSP recorder and re-packaging the media to use RTMP (Flash streaming). In fact this is probably preferable, since there is no way to encode H.264 from within the Flash client.
It's extremely rare that I need to see video of some impersonal event on the web "live". Probably the only situation where that might be useful is for some super critical political or disaster event (9/11, announcement from alien battleship in sky, etc.), and even that is pushing it. Pretty much everything can be canned, "tape delayed", edited, cached, etc. and then time-and-device shifted to fit my schedule and preferences.
For live personal video needs, there's always Skype video calls.
