Youtube Live Streaming Portal Officially Launches

You may soon be able to stream live shows on YouTube if not be live-streaming your own channel on Youtube. The online video giant launched today its YouTube Live portal that will integrate live streaming capabilities and discovery tools directly into YouTube's core platform. The system should eventually roll out to the masses, but will start off with select channel partners to ensure smooth content streaming until all the kinks are worked out.

"The goal is to provide thousands of partners with the capability to live stream from their channels in the months ahead," said YouTube. "In order to ensure a great live stream viewing experience, we'll roll this offering out incrementally over time."

The service has been tested before for streaming popular one-time events such as concerts, sporting events, and interviews. Early last September, the service trial proved buggy and faced a limited viewership. But in January, a new and improved version came back and now it's full steam ahead to build the system out to include streaming from thousands of content partners.

The new YouTube Live will not only have a landing page specifically for live streamed content browsing, it will also allow users to subscribe and mark events on the calendar for watching later. In this case, subscriptions not only alert subscribers of posted videos but also of upcoming streams.

There are already other services out there devoted to live streaming content such as Ustream, Justin.tv, and Qik, but with the juggernaut that is YouTube jumping into the ring, it will be interesting to see how this impacts the competition. For now you can go check out the YouTube Live portal.

[via VentureBeat]