Live streaming coming to YouTube

The Gadget Show  Monday 13 September 2010

YouTube is trialling a live streaming service

YouTube is conducting a two-day trial of a service that will allow selected partners to offer live broadcasts over the video-streaming site.

Four partners will be involved in the trial, which starts today and runs for a period of 48 hours. The streams will only be available for a limited period of time, and embedding won’t be allowed, but comments posted will remain live after the streams have closed to allow a chance for feedback to take place.

YouTube has trialled live streaming before, but only for single events such as concerts or presidential speeches and never as a full service. One of the biggest challenges in getting such a service off the ground is finding a way to offer live or near-live streaming while still being able to intercept inappropriate or dangerous content.

Restricting the service to selected partners rather than opening it up to the general public at large is the simplest way to get around that problem, with those partners then taking responsibility for the content being provided.