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How to Stream Live Video With YouTube

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In mid-December, YouTube announced that YouTube Live is now available for free to all members with accounts in good standing, so YouTube is certain to dominate live video as does on-demand video. At the recent Streaming Media West conference in sunny Huntington Beach, California, YouTube partner product manager Varun Talwar walked attendees through the necessary steps for streaming live. 

"We are streaming based on HTTP, so it allows us to do a few things -- things like adaptive bitrate in the player and the ability to go back in the stream," Talwar explained. "Users come in, they don't miss action. You can scrub back. We automatically record, or give you the option to record, as a video. And a YouTube Live event is just like another YouTube video, so you can share it, embed it, you can spread it as if it was a YouTube video."

While creating a live video stream is more complex that uploading a recorded video, YouTube is working to reduce that complexity.

"The other thing which was a big focus, and I think still is a focus, is to make the product simple," Talwar said. "I think live streaming is pretty complicated if you take all the pieces from acquisition to playback and analytics. One of the things we wanted to do -- and I think we're still not there, but we've come a long way -- is to get it very simple for people to go live. It shouldn't look like a whole lot of controls."

For a step-by-step walkthrough on setting up a YouTube live stream, download Talwar's presentation and watch the video below.

 

HOW TO: Using YouTube’s Platform for Live Events

YouTube’s live platform offers content owners a free toolset for broadcasting live events, opening up a huge opportunity to reach a large audience around the world. During this presentation, YouTube shows you how its platform can help build you a following and how tools, APIs, and their scalable infrastructure make it very easy for you to do so.

Speaker: Varun Talwar, Partner Product Manager, YouTube

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