YouTube Is the Sleeping Giant of Livestreaming

YouTube is beginning to take livestreaming seriously, and it could change the Internet.
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WIRED

The first game of the German soccer season kicked off on Friday. Bayern Munich vs. Hamburg, 8:30 pm Munich time. This game was a big one: It marked the new season, and the beginning of a new partnership between the Bundesliga league and Fox Sports. It also was on YouTube, broadcast for free all over the world.

At kickoff, there were 2,735 people glued to the stream, many of them also furiously typing trash talk and xenophobia into the running chat on the right side of the screen. (It's just like being there!) During the game, the stream was basically perfect. Only 720p (lame), but was perfect.

Soccer fans shouldn't get used to the treatment—the YouTube stream was a one-off from Fox Sports, promoting its new property as the season begins. But it's the latest indicator that YouTube is beginning to take livestreaming seriously. So far, the Internet's biggest video site has stood silently as Periscope, Meerkat, and countless rumored products from Facebook have made livestreaming video into a powerful new medium. But YouTube has the infrastructure and the audience, and now it's deciding to focus on live video. It's the sleeping giant of livestreaming, and it's finally waking up.

"Broadly speaking, we think about YouTube being synonymous with video," Manuel Bronstein says. Bronstein is the head of product for consumers—he's in charge of everything that impacts how creators and viewers use the platform. He wants YouTube to be suited to every kind of video, whether it's the latest Taylor Swift epic or the recent Dota e-sports championships. The platform is forever expanding: YouTube is making an app for kids, a music service, an app for gamers, and presumably many others. It's getting into 360-degree video, 8K video, and more. And live is a big part of the plan. "Live has alway been a part of video," Bronstein says. "And it’s actually always a very exciting part!"

As he sees it, livestreaming presents "creators," YouTube's term for the people actually making videos, with a new and different way to connect with fans. For YouTube, that's the whole job—the stars it has created are the future of its platform, period. "When they go live and they stream live," Bronstein says, "they can actually create a more intimate connection with their fans. Where they can actually ask questions real-time, or they can like what the person is doing in real-time."

YouTube built some of the infrastructure for live video almost by accident, in the course of creating the YouTube we know now. It has a terrific, usable player that is embeddable basically anywhere and accessible all over the world. It supports almost any technical setup you can think of. It has subscriptions, channels and a notification system that can easily shift from "Casey posted a new video" to "Casey is live!" But Bronstein and his team also discovered livestreaming comes with its quirks.

Mostly, that live video only works when it's live. And that there are 1,000 reasons a stream might stutter, buffer, or break. So YouTube built a system that captures your stream twice, and can switch between them if one goes offline. It's also worked to reduce latency—because if the gap between when you say something and when viewers hear it is more than a few seconds, real interaction and commenting becomes awkward and complicated.

They've been testing the infrastructure for more than four years, dating to its ambitious partnership with NBC to stream the 2012 Olympics in London. There's no more stressful beta test, really. "You didn’t want it to fail," Bronstein says. "You didn’t want to lose that precise magical moment when someone's breaking an Olympic record." Now, he says, the infrastructure is solid. It won accolades for its streaming at the Dota championships, streaming 1080p game content at 60 frames per second with hardly any hiccup.

Which means YouTube's next job is to get people using it.

And We're Live!

Late last week, Samsung announced two new high-end smartphones. Both have a new button in the camera app: a one-touch way to begin a live broadcast. Tap it, and suddenly anyone on YouTube can see through your camera lens. A few Sony phones have a similar feature, as does the HTC Re camera (the one that looks like a periscope).

Get ready to see more things like this as YouTube tries to make livestreaming as easy as pressing Record. "We just want to make it seamless for people to press the button and start livestreaming," Bronstein says. He says there are many other phone partnerships coming soon, and off-handedly mentions launching a certification program to get even more devices using the YouTube APIs to stream live. Brian Blau, a research director at Gartner, says another big announcement like Samsung's is coming in just a few weeks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrIxH6DToXQ
At the same time, the number of live events on YouTube is skyrocketing. There are the soccer games, and the Teen Choice Awards. Cameras in space and on a riverbank send us live shots of Earth and bears going fishing, respectively. When Felix Baumgardner took his epic leap from orbit, you saw it on YouTube. And maybe most exciting for Bronstein and YouTube, its creators are starting to use it as a way to connect in a less-produced, more interactive way on the platform.

If livestreaming is having a moment now, it's because it's finally easy to do. Before, Blau says, "you’ve had to be in the business, or you’ve had to do something special to set up livestreaming." Now anyone with a smartphone can stream. And they're starting to do it, albeit slowly.

Last week, Periscope announced it has 10 million users watching more than 40 years' worth of video each day. Meerkat, its biggest competitor, is quiet about its user numbers but appears to be only slightly smaller. Amazon-owned Twitch is the giant in the video game streaming market, but hasn't really branched out. Livestreaming is growing, but remains a vanishingly small percentage of the video we consume on the Web.

YouTube plans to grow that pie by splitting the difference, simultaneously offering the best of both live and on-demand video. Bronstein points to YouTube's DVR capabilities, for example, which let you show up to a livestream late and catch up. When you're done recording a live video, it doesn't have to disappear; it can go into your stream of on-demand videos on YouTube, meaning they'll keep making money from the live show even long after it ends. YouTube's also building in ways for creators to pause and take breaks—and make some money in the process. "The pre-roll advertising is cool," Bronstein says, "but as a creator, I want to take a pause. I want to go to the restroom, I want to drink some water; the potential to take a pause, and monetize that with an ad, is something of interest to them as well." If that sounds a lot like the TV you know, with commercial breaks every few minutes, that's because it is.
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In explaining the infrastructure, Bronstein brings up another thing: live video is hard. It's hard to be interesting for two unedited minutes, much less an hour or three. One of YouTube's first big livestreaming initiatives is in video games, because with games there's always something happening, something to talk about. (The gamer community is also enormous on YouTube—just ask PewDiePie.)

There are two types of livestreamers, Bronstein says. On one side, the Fox Sports and Olympics of the world, streaming huge events with huge infrastructure—they want a rock-solid livestream, with no failures and little overhead. On the other, the YouTubers, the creators currently doing their off-the-cuff, live interacting with fans on apps live Periscope and Instagram. Getting them streaming on YouTube is about making it ridiculously simple to do.

Hit Record

YouTube's currently testing a new gaming-focused app that brings livestreaming front and center. "It is making that experience more simple, more seamless, for what I would call a more casual livestreamer," Bronstein says. They're also thinking about ways to more prominently display the Live section on youtube.com, and are about to roll out tools to creators that make livestreaming much easier. It's all desktop-based for now, but don't be surprised to see similar tools, both for making and viewing live broadcasts, figure much more centrally into YouTube's wildly popular mobile app soon.

This is a key advantage for YouTube: Since it already has such a popular platform, all it has to do is tweak the interface and settings a bit, and people will start to discover live video. Unlike Periscope and Meerkat, Blau points out, live is just another feature for YouTube. (Same goes for Facebook, too, he points out: "If Facebook comes out with a live video app and that’s all that it does, I still think that’s a feature of Facebook.") Since it's a different feature and not a different platform, he says, live could gain traction on YouTube much more quickly than it has elsewhere. It's just another button, after all.

YouTube

Live also works in concert with a lot of YouTube's other plans. The company has always stayed at the bleeding edge of camera and video tech, and loves seeing it all together. "Imagine I’ve got this drone," Matthew Glotzbach, vice president of product management, says. "It’s got this live-streaming camera attached to it. It’s streaming at 60 fps, and eventually it could be streaming 360 video. Suddenly you’re like, wow, mind blown!" YouTube's sophisticated ContentID platform could help allay the piracy fears that come with live video, too. YouTube has almost the whole live-streaming package already—all it has to do now is make people think of it as more than the world's biggest on-demand video service.

YouTube is making noise at the right time, too. "It’s hard for me to imagine a scenario that says live video is not part of technology's future," Blau says. There are so many cameras around the world, and so much desire for real-time, unfiltered connection to the people and experiences we care about, that long-term the change just makes sense. (Blau is fond of calling live video "the next selfie," which is both horrifying and probably accurate.)
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YouTube has quietly spent the last few years building the pieces to be a livestreaming monster. It has a new generation of stars, people viewers want to see even when all they're doing is talking to the camera. It has rock-solid infrastructure, and a platform everyone already knows and uses. It has ways for Fox Sports to run commercials and make money, and ways for any random person to turn on the camera and talk to the world. And maybe most important, it has so many other things going on that it can wait for live broadcasting to really catch on, which is probably going to require better wireless bandwidth and improved cameras.

A few weeks ago, I watched President Barack Obama deliver a eulogy at a church in South Carolina. I could pause and rewind, and talk with people all over the world as we experienced the event together. When Obama started singing "Amazing Grace," I knew I'd be glad to have been there when it happened—and all I did was click a Twitter link. This is social, it's real-time, and it's available anywhere I want it. Soon enough, YouTube's technology will allow creators to add commercial breaks. It feels a lot like the future of TV.

I tell Blau this, and he laughs. "If YouTube isn’t television already," he says, "I don’t know what is."