YouTube to begin two-day test of streaming video service

Life may be about to get tougher for the likes of Justin.tv, Ustream, and Livestream. YouTube has announced it’s about to enter the streaming video market, although at first with just a two-day trial.

Beginning Monday morning at 8 AM PDT through Tuesday night, four of YouTube’s partners — Howcast, Next New Networks, Rocketboom and Young Hollywood — will stream live footage on YouTube. The embedded widget below shows a schedule. Of course, after tomorrow, that widget will be useless.

It’s unclear how long YouTube will take to evaluate the results. All the company said is that based on the results, they will evaluate rolling out the platform more broadly to our partners worldwide.

It sounds, based on that, that it will be content partners only that will get the functionality, if it passes muster. No, we won’t be able to see the millions of “regular” YouTube users doing crazy stuff live.

While YouTube has done the occasional live stream, those have mostly been one-offs. Why has it take so long to get here? It makes sense, due to the size of number of YouTube videos posted regularly. Joshua Siegel, a YouTube product manager, noted the size of YouTube, with 24 hours of video uploaded every minute and 2 billion views a day means this has to be done carefully. “We needed to take our time on this,” he said.

Its still possible this could make it into a future rollout. After all, it’s taken years to get here.

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