11/07/08

Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that YouTube will launch live streaming at its November 22 “YouTube Live!” event. That would put YouTube in competition with already existing live streaming sites UStream, Justin.TV, Stickam and Mogulus.

Nevertheless, the question remains: why? Live streaming is both very expensive and hard to monetize. Yahoo just shut its service down. A Google source told Silicon Valley Insider that if just 10 percent of YouTube's users adopted live streaming, bandwidth costs would go up 20 percent because live streaming clips tend to last longer than the short video clips typical of YouTube and they also require data to pass both ways.

It's also hard to make any money off live streaming. Why would a company want to advertise on content that is entirely uncontrollable? Perhaps YouTube will only allow paying customers to use the live streaming service. But that would go against YouTube’s whole ethos. More on the story when (and if) it breaks on later in November.

In an unrelated announcement, YouTube will reportedly start serving ad-supported, feature length films as soon as next month. The report is from CNet. It’s not a simple move.

How about DRM? YouTube videos now are actually downloaded to your computer to play. Will all the studios place nice? Canadian film company Lionsgate has only agreed to give YouTube access to short movie clips. Can enough ads be placed into a streaming movie to make it profitable without annoying viewers? Lots of questions. Let’s hope YouTube and parent Google have some answers.