YouTube is going Live | Hacker News Reader

YouTube is going Live

youtube-global.blogspot.com

195 pointsUncle_Sam79 comments

This 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.

That's my experience too, here in Turkey. I wonder if it's the same for US or Europe, though.

It 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.

> I don't think they've managed to keep up with demand.

They, or our ISP overlords, perhaps.

It'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.

Yeah 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.

I'm in the US on a fiber connection and I constantly wait for buffering. It's only gotten worse over the past year.

I'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.

I'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.

Have 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.

Heh, yeah, I get that. Oddly enough on hulu the video generally plays fine, but sometimes the ads pause to buffer...

Recently AdBlock seems to have completely zapped Hulu ads (you still have to wait, but nothing ever shows up).

Yeah, and this is exactly how I know that the problem isn't on my end. The commercials work great!

The ad is likely being served by a CDN server much closer to you than the server the video itself is coming from.

Should that irk me more? Or less? :)

And the bitrate of the advertisements is always very low.

Until I ran a browser (Chrome, or it might have been Safari) that didn't have AdBlockPlus installed, I had actually never seen a video ad on YouTube that wasn't part of the video being watched (i.e. a pre-roll ad). I didn't find out that they had implemented this until about 2 months ago.

I don't run an ad blocker because I feel like watching/viewing an ad is the least I can do to support a free site. Just to be clear, I'm not condemning you for using an ad blocker, to each his own, just clarifying why I do see the ads.

That said, I still think it's crazy that the quality of service for Youtube's ads seems to be a priority over the actual video.

Your 'voluntary' user data supports the 'free' sites.

Not if they cant use it to sell him ads

You think they care about the individual?

No they care about the individuals.

Youtube has ads?

It 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) to test the latter.

Similarly 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.

I'm to the point that I dont try to watch anything on youtube directly. I use keepvid to grab it and play in VLC.

There's also get_flash_videos which works on a number of sites as well: http://code.google.com/p/get-flash-videos/

You 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.

YouTube 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.

I 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.

What'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.

yeah, 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

Think 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.

You 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.

YouTube'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.

people also upload really terrible stuff right now, and it seems to be flagged quickly enough (though not quickly enough for Italian judges).

It has: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/11/teen-kills-self/

Or worse, stream pirated music or movies! Sarcasm aside, I imagine that would be a pretty big issue for them.

I'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"

I 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.

Startup 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.

Email me. Lets make it happen.

Neat 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.

Can't kickstarter.com already be used to do this? The live video could go on Justin.tv, USTREAM, or whatever.

Cool 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".

I doubt it. It will probably quickly spiral towards "watch me take my clothes off".

Wow! I can just hear the lawyers salivating now...

Would love to hear thoughts from the uStream/Justin.tv folk.

This 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.

Any popular legit streamer on Justin.tv could easily become a partner. They will also likely open it up more at some point.

Unfortunately 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.

It's hard to sell brand advertising on user generated content, which is another reason the approved partners are desirable.

Care to place a specific upper bound on "so popular"?

Top 500 web site vs. Top 50

that'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.

Once again, Yahoo was ahead of the curve by 3 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Live

(the other recent example being Instant Search).

... 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.

Thats 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.

I 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.

I 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.

if 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 :)

It'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.

They 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.

I 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.

This 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.

It'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.

I 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

Doesn'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?

There 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.

Do these protocols also capture video input from the camera?

I would be surprised if in-browser tools are the main way that content will be streamed. Other sites usually use external software.

There might be something in here, but it's buried in details: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/complete/v...

There 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.

Anybody found a broadcasting API for this yet?

One more time killer in the internet.

I hereby declare this the first day of the web 3.0 era.

No really, I do.

Seriously though.

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and today was a pretty good day

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