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YouTube wants Android apps to use its live-streaming tool
It may seem as if YouTube Live is still a work in progress for Google, and in many ways that continues to be the case. That's far from being a bad thing, though. Over the course of the past couple of years, YouTube's live-streaming feature has become available to an increasing number of people on both ends of the camera, by way of different devices and platforms. Soon, with a new open-source project called YouTube WatchMe for Android, the video service is hoping that developers will start integrating its real-time broadcasting capabilities to their apps. Google says the tool is only an experiment right now, but it wouldn't surprise us to see it become more than that in the not-so-distant future. If you're interested in digging a little deeper, or contributing your wisdom to the project, be sure to take a gander at the GitHub repository right here.
YouTube live streaming this year's London Paralympics in the US and Canada
Now that the Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps show in London is well behind us, it's time for this summer's Paralympics to get started -- in fact, they've been underway since this past Wednesday, August 29th. But in case you've been missing out on all the action due to shortage of viewing options, YouTube just announced it'll be streaming over 500 hours of live competitions to folks in the US of A and Canada. The real-time streams are being brought to you via the ParalympicSportsTV channel, which will also offer more than 1000 hours of on-demand content, such as daily highlights, behind-the-scenes footage and athlete interviews. The only thing left to do now is grab some popcorn and hope your country of choice leads that glorious medal count -- so far, it's China with the celebrated number one spot.
YouTube gives live video streamers better production tools, ways to make money
It's been about a year since YouTube took the beta tag off of its live video streams and to celebrate it's flipping the switch on a few new features. One major way to pull in better content is to allow its publishers to profit from it, and now they can either by charging viewers pay-per-view-style or through instream ads. On the backend they have improvements like a guided flow to follow before events go live and real time data breaking down their viewership by geography and format. Finally, Google is also provided Wirecast for YouTube Live free of charge, a bit of software that it says allows partners to do all the production (capture, switching between sources, live effects and overlays and more) necessary for "professional looking" live events. There's more information available after the break, but as long as this means we never have to see another jump cut vlog then we're all for it.
FFXIV takes to YouTube Live for its one-year anniversary [Updated]
Lights... camera... internet connection... aaand action! To celebrate Final Fantasy XIV's first anniversary, Square-Enix's Naoki Yoshida will be taking the stage for a live edition of the Producer's Letter. This event will happen on October 4th at 8:00 p.m. a.m. EDT on YouTube Live. Yoshida will use the time to field player questions from around the world and will also talk about the future of the title as it heads into its second year of operation. Final Fantasy XIV will celebrate its first anniversary on September 30th. For Massively's musings on where the game's been and where it's going, make sure to check out this past week's Mog Log for the full skinny!
YTLive web app lets you watch YouTube Live broadcasts on your iOS device
YouTube entered the live video streaming market with the launch of its YouTube Live service earlier this month. The high-profile video site is competing against similar live stream services, such as Ustream and Justin.tv. Unlike its competitors, YouTube Live uses only Flash technology to deliver its live stream. As a result, iOS owners are unable to watch these live feeds on their mobile devices. Coming to the rescue is a web app, YTLive, which lets you copy the URL of a YouTube Live feed and paste it into their web-based player. The player converts the live stream to a format compatible with iOS and lets you watch a broadcast within Mobile Safari. As long as YTLive's servers can handle the load of streaming video to millions of iOS devices, then we may have a winner. [Via Engadget]
YouTube Live now streams to iOS, courtesy of YTLive web app
Watching YouTube on an iOS device can be a pleasant experience, unless you're trying to view the service's Live content. YouTube Live -- its answer to Ustream, Livestream, and other streaming video services -- was recently launched after months of limited trials. Wonderful news, of course, but there is just one catch: it uses Flash to provide the streaming instead of HTML5. At first, this meant iOS users were left uninvited to the party, but a savvy developer sensed the coming frustration and built YTLive, a web app enabling YouTube Live streams on Safari. Find and copy the link to the live stream you want, go to the app, and paste it in the box provided. Then, let your hearts be gladdened as you delightfully devour as much video as you can handle. Head to our source link below to find the app.
Watching Coachella live on YouTube would be a great use for Google TV -- if it worked (Updated)
While waiting for hardware, sped up software and access to the Android Market's apps, early Google TV adopters looking to mix up their internet and TV viewing got some bad news (again) this weekend while trying to access YouTube's live broadcasts of the Coachella music festival. Despite the event being promoted on the official blog, owners of all three Google TV devices reported the stream would not load for them. We couldn't pull it up on our Sony Internet TV, getting only a loading bar and then the black screen shown above even though other YouTube Live broadcasts and many live Flash video streams work without a problem. At this time we haven't heard back from Google on the issue and a check of support forums came up empty too so for now a laptop with an HDMI cable is still the simplest way to get this internet video on your HDTV. Update: The @GoogleTV Twitter account just reported the team is "looking into it" so hopefully there's a chance of resolution before the event is over, we'll keep an eye out. Until then, we're hearing that the stream is working on the Boxee Box (Thanks @EricHulen) so that may be an option as well.
YouTube starts up live streaming trial, could turn into LiveTube if all goes well
Sure, we've all seen sprinklings of live content on YouTube, but now Google's video arm is finally threatening to really flex that content streaming muscle. Today and tomorrow, chosen partners will participate in a trial of a new live streaming platform, and so long as the traffic doesn't burn down too many server farms, the feature should be progressively rolled out to a wider audience in the near future. Alas, it sounds like Google intends to limit the capability to content partners only and not allow its masses of regular users the pleasure of livestreaming their cats' latest acts of mischief out to the world. Oh, such a shame.
