YouTube Live

You’ve probably chanced upon YouTube’s live streaming events every once in a while now, and now it’s going to be a staple to your regular YouTube programming: YouTube has officially announced that it will be slowly rolling out its live streaming platform to its thousands of users, starting off with some YouTube partners.

A page solely dedicated to the experimental platform at www.youtube.com/live can be accessed by everyone to check out what’s currently streaming or will be streaming in the future and will allow them to mark those events on their calendars. The thing is, only YouTube partners with a good status on YouTube will be allowed to test the platform, allowing them to engage with their audience in real time.  I’m still waiting for my invitation, but in the meantime have (re)started a regular BlogTV live streaming show every Wednesday evening at 6pm PST.

The YouTube Product Marketing Manager  says that the expansion effort is in line with “YouTube’s vision is to become the premiere destination for all video on the web.”  It’s certainly been doing a great job of that since it came onto the scene just over 5 years ago.

Select partners and musicians like Mystery Guitar Man (Joe Penna) and The Gregory Brothers are reported to be streaming soon on the website.   It will be interesting to see how the YouTube live streaming compares to the current contenders like BlogTV and ustream!