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YouTube is going Live
- dangero 16y agoThis is an obvious thing for them to do, but the surprising part about it to me is that half the time youtube is too slow to play a video clip I choose. It's very unreliable, so it will be interesting to see how well the streams work.
- ludwigvan 16y agoThat's my experience too, here in Turkey. I wonder if it's the same for US or Europe, though.
- ch0wn 16y agoIt's definitely the case for Germany. It seems to depend on the particular video, though. I had some videos not loading at all at 360p, while others loaded perfectly fine at 720p.
- dangero 16y agoYeah I've found the same thing. It must depend on something back end, like the encoding used when the file was uploaded, or whether the servers holding that particular file are busy at the time. It's very frustrating.
- JeremyHerrman 16y agoI'm in the US on a fiber connection and I constantly wait for buffering. It's only gotten worse over the past year.
- city41 16y agoIt often is now the case in the US. A couple years of go YouTube's streaming was pretty much flawless. I don't think they've managed to keep up with demand.
- RickHull 16y ago> I don't think they've managed to keep up with demand. They, or our ISP overlords, perhaps.
- citricsquid 16y agoI'm in England with ~15mbps down, 1mbps up, never noticed any slow down with Youtube. I can't recall ever not being able to stream without buffering, always been good for me.
- AndrewHampton 16y agoI'm in Virginia, and this happened all the time to me while I was on Comcast, but since switching to another ISP, I never encountered this problem.
- jrsmith1279 16y agoHave you ever noticed that you never have a problem playing ads, but yet the video following the ad doesn't work half the time? That's one thing that's irked me about youtube for a while.
- chadcf 16y agoHeh, yeah, I get that. Oddly enough on hulu the video generally plays fine, but sometimes the ads pause to buffer...
- Qz 16y agoRecently AdBlock seems to have completely zapped Hulu ads (you still have to wait, but nothing ever shows up).
- dangero 16y agoYeah, and this is exactly how I know that the problem isn't on my end. The commercials work great!
- jrockway 16y agoYoutube has ads?
- JshWright 16y agoThe ad is likely being served by a CDN server much closer to you than the server the video itself is coming from.
- barrkel 16y ago
- capstone 16y agoIt could be YouTube, or it could be your ISP "shaping" the traffic. You can use Glasnost (http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest-mlab.php http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest-mlab.php) to test the latter.
- MediaBehavior 16y agoSimilarly awful is (usually) my youtube experience over DSL :( However: just now watching eyepatchentertainment's test broadcast I find it remarkable. Sharp picture. Perfectly synced sound. Smooth scroll of live comments. Unknown fps, but it has no jerkiness to video. I worry for what this will do re" jacquesm's ww.com. Looks like youtube-live will be setting the standard for streaming vid.
- phlux 16y agoI'm to the point that I dont try to watch anything on youtube directly. I use keepvid to grab it and play in VLC.
- pyre 16y agoThere's also get_flash_videos which works on a number of sites as well: http://code.google.com/p/get-flash-videos/ http://code.google.com/p/get-flash-videos/
- rkudeshi 16y agoYou can also try playing it in VLC directly. Just use VLC's "Open Network File" menu command and paste the YouTube URL. Plays at highest resolution possible. Works great for me.
- barrkel 16y agoYouTube uses some kind of bursting heuristic that is marginal in certain scenarios. What it does is it loads the first chunk of a request to start playing with high bandwidth, but it then throttles the connection to approximately the bitrate of the video stream. The idea is that YouTube reduces the costs (bandwidth, CPU, routing etc.) of transferring bits that are never actually consumed, because the user stopped watching the video before it finished playing. The quickest way to get a YouTube video is to download it with a download manager that sends multiple requests. Those requests ought to trigger the initial burstiness, and if you have enough of them either the initial burst will be sufficient to cover the whole file or the total bandwidth (even though throttled) across all simultaneous downloads will reach your own download bandwidth.
- nitrogen 16y agoI noticed once that my traffic to various geographic locations was being routed through non-obvious other locations first, such as going through Texas to get to California (I'm in Utah). My link to California was saturated, so anything hosted there ran terribly slow. A CDN that uses naive geolocation to select a server might not be aware of these bizarre routing situations, picking a less-than-optimal server.
- kalleboo 16y agoWhat's interesting is that they're still only opening it for "partners", so they're not quite taking up the fight with Ustream, justin.tv or Niconicodouga yet.
- ChrisArchitect 16y agoyeah, true -- this is all about scale. They have tons of online content producing partners that will be interested in doing live stuff, and also on the scale side of things, the YouTube reach is immense compared to the DIY streamer sites like justin.tv etc
- MatthewPhillips 16y agoThink if someone live streamed a suicide or some other horrible thing. On Justin.tv, Ustream that would be horrible enough, but on YouTube it would be a whole other level. I'm surprised it hasn't happened on one of those sites yet actually.
- TillE 16y agoYou can't make policy based on the worst possible circumstances. Streaming video sites are already used for pornography, rebroadcasts of live TV, etc. It hasn't really hurt them.
- MatthewPhillips 16y agoYouTube's on a completely different scale. The public and regulators would go apeshit on Google. "We did the best we could" won't cut it.
- magicalist 16y agopeople also upload really terrible stuff right now, and it seems to be flagged quickly enough (though not quickly enough for Italian judges).
- shii 16y ago
- davidcann 16y agoAnybody found a broadcasting API for this yet?
- silvestrov 16y agoThey should definitely fix the timezones. Google already know which timezone I'm in (from the ip address, should allow manual override in the preferences) and should use my current location's timezone in the display.
- colinsidoti 16y agoStartup Idea - Live streaming where people say what they're going to do, then collect money in escrow before they actually do it. IE: I'll try and do a standing long jump over these ten people if I collect $20. If they succeed, they get the money. If not, the money get's returned. Other use cases could be people constantly streaming and having a "hat out" to "throw money" in, akin to street performers. Crowdsourced, streaming entertainment.
- gersh 16y agoEmail me. Lets make it happen.
- Splines 16y agoNeat idea, but I can imagine several ways this could go wrong (in the "this is why we can't have nice things" sort of way). For example, this sort of thing already exists in shadier portions of the internet. It's also the reason why MSFT removed the gift-MS-points feature.
- troymc 16y agoCan't kickstarter.com already be used to do this? The live video could go on Justin.tv, USTREAM, or whatever.
- ernestipark 16y agoCool idea, but I can see it quickly spiraling into -- "watch me jump off my roof and most likely miss this trampoline and hurt myself terribly for $10".
- jrockway 16y agoI doubt it. It will probably quickly spiral towards "watch me take my clothes off".
- jw84 16y agoThey're called cam porn sites.
- deleted 16y ago
- jmathai 16y agoWould love to hear thoughts from the uStream/Justin.tv folk.
- unreal37 16y agoThis might affects uStream. It won't affect Justin.tv. Youtube is only allowing "approved partners" stream video - like NBC, CBS, ABC. For now, it's not some guy live streaming his world of warcraft campaign.
- staunch 16y agoAny popular legit streamer on Justin.tv could easily become a partner. They will also likely open it up more at some point.
- c2 16y agoUnfortunately for Justin.tv, those 'approved partners' is also likely the key players where the money is for live events (Olympics, sporting events, etc.). Starcraft/WoW matches and such will only be so popular.
- magicalist 16y agothat's the same language they used for when they started allowing longer video lengths, and I started seeing much longer minecraft videos that day, so it seems like this won't be limited to just big corporate accounts.
- joebasirico 16y agoI'm sure there is a market for this, but it's not me or my demographic. Technical hurdles aside, I tend to trend away from most "live" events. I like the idea of live breaking news. For most things, however I'd rather have them on demand. This is one of the reasons why my wife and I recently canceled cable for Hulu, Netflix and other on demand services. I don't see myself structuring my day around "Wheezy Live On Youtube"
- slouch 16y agoI agree. I saw ThisWeekIn is scheduled to stream This Week in Startups on Tuesday. I watch the show, but never live. However, I read rumors on reddit a few weeks ago about YouTube trying to offer NBA and NHL games via live streams. Sports are a different story, for me, and I am willing to pay for access to NHL games. NHL's GameCenter has blackout restrictions that eliminate it as a cable subscription replacement. I know Google won't have that sort of crap, so I'm hopeful for YouTube Live Sports.
- ajays 16y agoOnce again, Yahoo was ahead of the curve by 3 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Live http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Live (the other recent example being Instant Search).
- simonw 16y ago... and once again, they shut it down after less than a year (well, instant search never even launched in the first place). Yahoo! Live was really cool. I used it to watch the Eurovision Song Contest with friends from the US once.
- spoiledtechie 16y agoThats the problem with Yahoo. Never enough PR for what they create. If they want something done, you have to publicize it. Sadly, Yahoo is on a downward spiral. People always asking, what do they do again? They are nerds, but sadly too much management and not enough PR.
- ajays 16y agoI think they may have been a bit ahead of the time here. One problem with Yahoo is that they aren't able to lay out a vision: here's something cool, and here's why you will like it. Steve Jobs is the gold standard here, of course.
- phlux 16y agoI think its because they had shitty UI design. The yahoo pages ALWAYS were too cluttered. They should have done minimalism and dropped the cartoony icons and lame yodels and focused on a classy interface.
- magicalist 16y agoif we're trying to be fair, that wikipedia article alone links to two other live streaming sites that launched before yahoo live. people have been streaming video for a while now :)
- flexd 16y agoThis is a nice feature, but i don't see how it solves their obvious issues serving out traffic? The past year i've had lots and lots of problems watching media. It will fail in 360p but suddenly work great in 720p (bw-wise), i know a lot of people experience this.
- cft 16y agoDoesn't this tie them to Flash? As far as I know, one can live stream video only using Flash, there are no provisions in HTML5. Is that correct?
- wmf 16y agoThere are three or four competing HTTP-based non-Flash live streaming protocols duking it out in the IETF. AFAIK Chrome hasn't implemented any of them yet.
- cft 16y agoDo these protocols also capture video input from the camera?
- JeremyBanks 16y agoI would be surprised if in-browser tools are the main way that content will be streamed. Other sites usually use external software.
- wmf 16y agoThere might be something in here, but it's buried in details: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/complete/video-conferencing-and-peer-to-peer-communication.html http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/complete/v...
- jallmann 16y agoThere is nothing stopping YouTube from running, say, a RTSP recorder and re-packaging the media to use RTMP (Flash streaming). In fact this is probably preferable, since there is no way to encode H.264 from within the Flash client.
- jerrya 16y agoI want to see this make it down to the phone, ala Qik (which is currently broekn on the Nexus One (or was as of a month ago)). Then I'd really like to see an explosion of #copwatch #tsawatch live videos. #civilliberties
- slavamnemonic 16y agoOne more time killer in the internet.
- beefman 16y agoI hereby declare this the first day of the web 3.0 era.
- cantbecool 16y agoI wonder if Youtube will be competitive and match what other live streaming sites pay their broadcasters for video advertisements? From anecdotal evidence, I know on Justin.tv select broadcasters that stream their Starcraft 2 matches make .002 cents per viewer for each 30 second commercial break, which is not too shabby for simply playing a video game. Most broadcasters that are partners on Justin.tv typically have 2000+ people watching their stream simultaneously.
- mkramlich 16y agoIt's extremely rare that I need to see video of some impersonal event on the web "live". Probably the only situation where that might be useful is for some super critical political or disaster event (9/11, announcement from alien battleship in sky, etc.), and even that is pushing it. Pretty much everything can be canned, "tape delayed", edited, cached, etc. and then time-and-device shifted to fit my schedule and preferences. For live personal video needs, there's always Skype video calls.
- chedigitz 16y agoIt's been a long time overdue. As both a YouTube and Ustream partner, I'm interested in how this could change the advertising revenues for live events. Ustream uses google's adsense, so it would be hard for ustream to match YouTube's ad split.