« YouTube Live Streaming Quick Review »

Some of you may have heard about YouTube's Live Streaming service that was currently being utilized by bigger outfits such as Machinima over the past few months. Today, the service became available on the IPLAYWINNER YouTube Channel so I decided to sit down with it for a bit and see how it worked. 

The service is definitely a bit awkward at first to say the least. As far as I can tell, you have to set an event for a certain time instead of just being able to stream instantly. There may be a way around this that I don't know about, but for now there will be a countdown until the stream starts. 

More than that, you have to click the "Live" tab and click "Start Broadcast" to push the video live, even after the event time has passed. Again, this seems a bit cumbersome compared to the likes of JTV and USTREAM where you can just let it rip right out of the gates. 

After setting the date and time, YouTube will allow you to download an XML file that works within Adobe FME. After that, simply load up the profile and you're pretty much set to go. So while starting the broadcast is a little odd, loading up the config file for FME isn't anything I'm not used to by now which is good.

So how does it look? Overall it looked pretty clean, even without messing around with too many settings in Adobe FME. It doesn't look at good as JTV, but again, I didn't quite optimize the stream so I'm sure there are some tweaks that can be made to make it look a bit clearer. All in all, it was totally watchable with a solid framerate so not too much to worry about there.

There are a few oddities about the service, one being that you're unable to check the viewer count from the actual stream page. From the "Live" tab on the channel I could see how many viewers we had, but for people simply watching from the stream URL, the view count was always set to zero.

Next is the fact that we cant seem to set chat mods. Right now it looks like the chat is pretty much a free-for-all, and anyone who has checked out a stream chat before knows this isn't a good thing. A certain level of moderation is usually always needed, especially for larger events. We'll see if they add this in later down the line.

Also, using a standard YouTube URL for the stream seems a bit odd. It would be nice to be able to have a custom URL so viewers dont have to punch in a series of numbers and letters to find the stream. Something like http://www.youtube.com/iplaywinner/starbase would be ideal. If I end up finding a way around this I'll let you guys know. 

The service apparently has an auto archive feature for the stream as well. That said, it's been over an hour and the recorded broadcast still hasn't shown up. If it decides to show up within the next day or so, I'll be sure to post it here so you can check it out and see how it looks.

The verdict for me at this point is that while this is a cool service with a lot of potential, there still needs to be a few adjustments to be made, not only to get the actual stream live but also other features that have been standard amongst JTV and USTREAM for sometime now. 

We wont be switching our broadcasts to YouTube Live anytime soon, but I'll continue to test it over the coming weeks and keep everyone up to date on any new developments and changes. YouTube obviously has a ton of reach and the ability to bring in a new set of viewers who are unfamiliar with fighting games so this is a service I'll definitely be keeping my eye on. 

If your channel has this feature, check it out and post up in the comments if you found anything new or something I might have missed!