A new live stream platform, YouTube Gaming launched on the web as well as on various Android and iOS apps on Wednesday, August 26. For some time now, Google has been trying to compete with Amazon’s Twitch video game streaming by making YouTube, its subsidiary, more streaming friendly offering users to upload their videos running at sixty frames per second, and by personalizing users’ content based on their preferences, their likes, and the content they follow. Furthermore, YouTube’s latest page youtube.com/stream, allows its users to stream with their personal URL.
The new platform automatically collects all gaming-content videos of over 25,000 different games together with video game live streams. As YouTube told the BBC, California based giant video-sharing website ‘wanted tackle a "fragmented" experience for the gaming genre.’ According to BBC, “one expert said YouTube was ‘fighting back’ against rivals such as Twitch and Daily Motion.” Engineering manager for YouTube Gaming Frank Petterson said in a statement that, “Together, we all make gaming better. Our peers make us better gamers, and games are made better by the communities that surround them.”
YouTube’s head of gaming Ryan Wyatt said that the company wanted to give their users who also happen to be gamers, the opportunity to live stream and also ‘create a one-stop shop for all gaming content.’ As for its standard copyright checks, YouTube said that live game stream will also be subject to its usual copyright restrictions. “The company's Content ID system will terminate broadcasts if "third-party content" such as music is detected, a feature absent on Twitch,” the BBC wrote.
Not long ago, the current leader in video game live streaming market, Twitch hit another milestone reaching 2 million concurrent viewers. “The opportunity in gaming video is enormous, and others have clearly taken notice. We are dedicated to being the best social, global, multi-screen video platform for gamers, period,” said Twitch senior vice president of marketing Matthew DiPietro.
If YouTube successfully attracts more and more users, Twitch’s ‘video game streaming monopoly,’ might break sooner than we think. “Google’s plan seems to be to just pull Twitch’s audience out from under them, creating a platform that does the same thing more effectively, building on the already massive YouTube community in the process,” according to Wired.
In the near future, YouTube plans to use its new live broadcasting platform for other purposes besides video game live streaming. “We created a live platform that will benefit all of YouTube. I can picture sports, beauty tutorials, live cooking streams,” said Wyatt for BBC. “Gaming is a specialist topic but YouTube is a generalist outlet. Establishing a new platform means it can skew the features to better suit gamers,” he added.
(Picture Source: onedio.com)