Streaming the Olympics: Is Live Video the Next Logical Step for YouTube?

  • YouTube may be best recognized for its sports highlights, user-generated content, music videos and classic TV clips available on-demand, but its live streaming of the Summer Olympics may indicate where the video giant is headed next.
  • YouTube partnered with NBC to provide 34 million live streams during the first week of the Summer 2012 Games. Nearly 1.5 million people watched live streaming of the U.S. women’s gymnastics team winning the gold and nearly 1.2 million watched Michael Phelps beat Ryan Lochte in the 200-meter individual medley.
  • YouTube built an entirely new platform to support as many as 100 simultaneous high-definition feeds. Jason Gaedtke, YouTube’s director of software engineering, suggests the efforts will not stop at the Olympics.
  • “While it’s true we built this platform for the Olympics, a better way of characterizing it would be to say we used the Olympics as an opportunity to challenge our capabilities and set some high quality-of-service and streaming goals going forward,” he says.
  • YouTube has live streamed concerts and last year’s Royal wedding, but now has a larger infrastructure in place for the future. “We certainly see strong demand in a couple verticals: gaming, sports, news increasingly — anything with a realtime or community-driven aspect to it seems to play well in this format,” adds Gaedtke.
  • YouTube is also looking to increase its social features, as evidenced by its recent hosting of Google+ Hangouts and adding publicly viewable audience analytics. Decreasing the distinction between live and on-demand video is next.
  • “We’re intentionally blurring the line between live and video-on-demand,” Gaedtke explains. “With the technology we’ve built here — real-time transcoding at a high level as well as how we prepare the media stream — we can immediately go from a live to DVR experience once an event ends.”

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