Want to create your own broadcast channel and stream your live shows out to the masses? How about for free? YouTube has taken steps to make it happen, and as of this week it is now easier than ever.
YouTube make some big steps in the past year concerning live broadcasting. The first step was to enable live shows on its Website, meaning you could hook up your video equipment and stream out your show to hundreds or millions. It was in beta for a while and mainly offered to higher-traffic YouTube producers and partners. Then YouTube opened it up wider, but the catch was you needed to have 1000 or more subscribers. It also then added live streams to its apps. You may not know it, and that is probably because it's a little hard to find, but in the YouTube apps on mobile there is now a live programming section, which features channels broadcasting out live shows and series 24/7. Depending on the time of the day, selection could be large or small, but it's available right now, right on your tablet or smartphone.
What YouTube did this week was lower the bar even lower, to channels of only 100 or more subscribers. With a little hustling on social media like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, most could pull together 100 peeps to meet the requirement and then be off and broadcasting. So if you are a creative producer thinking about getting your programming out there, now is an excellent time to check out the live YouTube features.
We’ve seen various waves of new options for mobile TV, but live broadcasting could be the next big thing. Surprisingly, YouTube has not promoted it too heavily, and in fact, a majority of its big producers still do it the old-fashioned way, with slickly produced pre-recorded programming. But now could be the time to branch out into this brave new world, just like podcasts started a revolution, live TV, on smartphones and tablets, not only have a chance to be the next big thing, but it's here now for content producers to take advantage of at no cost.
