Coming live to a screen near you: YouTube announces live streaming

December 23, 2013

1 billion-plus unique users a month, 100 hours of video are uploaded every minute and over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month.

I am of course talking about YouTube, the platform that uses video to inform and entertain the masses. And now the site is set to harness the power of live video, as YouTube has announced that it is expanding its live video services to anyone who has a verified account.

What this means is that anyone on YouTube with a verified account can stream live video, regardless of their number of followers. Previously the service was exclusively to profiles with more than 100 followers.

The live video feature will be extremely beneficial for brands looking to record their events and presentations to share with people who are unable to attend the event but want to see what is happening. The Red Bull Stratos live video with Felix Baumgartner was an example of YouTube’s live video feature, which received 8 million views on the platform last year.

Of course you do not have to arrange a jump from space in your first foray into YouTube live streaming, but streaming the keynote speech at your event, the atmosphere backstage or interviews with key attendees would work well.

And if you are a fan of Google Hangouts, the search giant has also announced that users can launch a Google+ Hangout on Air directly from YouTube, allowing you to not only reach your fans and audience live, but to invite participants to join your show.

What do you think about YouTube’s decision to make live video available to everyone? Let us know and leave your comments below or tweet them to @iftweeter

Latest Posts

Design and disability are so often discussed in terms of basic “accommodation” and “access,” yet my visit to the V&A’s Design and Disability exhibition completely shifted that perspective. Rather than framing disability as an issue to be fixed, the exhibition presents it as a culture, a rich set of identities, and a radical design force shaping practice from the 1940s right up to today.

Lurkers are your biggest audience and they’re deciding in silence. They watch in feeds, sanity-check you in comments, communities and reviews, then repeat whatever proof is easiest to quote internally. That’s why social feels harder, it’s no longer a click machine, it’s an answer surface. Ofcom shows AI summaries are now common in search results, and YouTube remains the UK’s biggest social utility by reach and time spent. If your story is inconsistent, your evidence is scattered, or your customer proof is buried, lurkers can’t do the job of trusting you for you.

Pinterest has rolled out a brand-new Media Planner inside its advertising tools, and it’s designed to make planning and managing Pin campaigns a whole lot simpler. In short? It gives you a clearer view of what you’re running, who you’re targeting, and what results you can expect…