YouTube working on live streaming
I’ve been sitting here in the San Jose Convention Center where Google’s sales and operations team have been having an in-house event. Al Gore spoke yesterday and a bunch of bloggers were on a panel today. Anyway, random Googler’s have been coming by all afternoon while I’ve been using the wifi to keep up on the comments and Twitters coming in thanks to my redesign.
So, a few YouTube engineers have come by and I keep asking them if they are working on live streaming features. They are very aware they are getting outrun by streaming services like Ustream, Stickam, Justin.tv. They are more worried about cell phone videos like Qik, Flixwagon, Bambuser, and Kyte.tv. They tell me they see tons of people at concerts using their cell phones to record video and know that’s a big market that they’ll need to serve. Funny enough, several of them mentioned Seesmic and Seesmic’s new video comments. Since those are only five days old now, it’s surprising that they’ve gotten on the radar screen so quickly. Yesterday Loic Le Meur, CEO of Seesmic, told me they are seeing huge growth and have hundreds of blogs who’ve already deployed those new comments.
The employees quickly add “you didn’t hear it from me” and aren’t willing to tell me dates or other details (the devil is in the details) but it’s clear that YouTube’s leadership realizes that they’ve slipped behind in innovation and are going to start putting out some new stuff to keep its brand fresh.
Looking forward to it. YouTube has a huge audience compared to all these other newer services, so it’ll be interesting to see what they do in response.
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April 30th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
This sounds pretty awesome, do you think they will release new features within the next month or so?
April 30th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
“Funny enough, several of them mentioned Seesmic and Seesmic’s new video comments. Since those are only five days old now, it’s surprising that they’ve gotten on the radar screen so quickly. Yesterday Loic Le Meur, CEO of Seesmic, told me they are seeing huge growth and have hundreds of blogs who’ve already deployed those new comments.”
Why the over-hype?
I was standing there with you yesterday when Loic said that about 150 Seesmic blogs had deployed video comments thus far.
Video comments are an interesting idea but is are they really the next big breakthrough?
April 30th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
next generation of videos is live stream i think.
April 30th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Jason: Loic told me yesterday afternoon the number was up to 250.
Justin: I didn’t sense that it’s that close. But at least they are starting to admit that they are working on some of these things.
April 30th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
I’m a little afraid of the content we’re going to see with YouTube streaming. It seems like we’ll see a lot of content being put out there that shouldn’t be. A lot of copyright violations, nudity, underage stuff and so on.
April 30th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
I’m glad to see this coming down the pipe!! Good job, Robert!
April 30th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
No mention of the YouTube.com outage this afternoon about 1:15 CST lasting about 45 minutes?
April 30th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
I think that video comment is revolutionary feature
May 1st, 2008 at 12:14 am
Robert is right, I said 250. We have 200 up on the wiki http://wiki.seesmic.com but know from the server it is higher than that.
May 1st, 2008 at 12:26 am
and in more important news: ADOBE just announced they will release the Flash format specs and will drop all licensing fees in regards to playback and creation of the Flash format. This includes .flv files as well as the Air runtime.
This is pretty huge!!! It pretty munch means the Flash format is now open source!
The first impact? Be prepared to see Flash format support on the iPhone…
… oh, and the fact that Flash probably just killed Microsofts hopes of making Silverlight a Flash killer.
May 1st, 2008 at 3:32 am
random Googler’s
’s is for possessive
no apostrophe for plural
random Googlers
May 1st, 2008 at 4:02 am
random Googlers
NOT
random Googler’s
Can’t you correct your post?
May 1st, 2008 at 4:02 am
that’s welcome news! Youtube is widely used here in the Philippines and live streaming feature would definitely be a big help especially that our country is composed of 7,000 plus islands. It would make this archipelago more accessible, productive, and hopefully move forward as well.
May 1st, 2008 at 5:59 am
Cool. I’m hopeful for this.
No hate intended Loic
May 1st, 2008 at 9:04 am
I’m telling ya, you’re missing a big scoop! YouTube.com is hinky off and on this morning.
May 1st, 2008 at 2:31 pm
[...] Scoble has rumors of YouTube working on live streaming. [...]
May 1st, 2008 at 8:54 pm
[...] YouTube to Offer Live Streaming: Okay it’s a good idea and something they need to deal with the onslaught of competition. However, I don’t see them having the ability to filter copyrighted material, or anything that violates terms of agreement like they can now. [...]
May 6th, 2008 at 7:00 am
[...] Youtube Working on Live Streaming - Scobleizer.com [...]