His statement offered less than a 100 percent chance of it occurring, and a wide timeframe to boot. Still, Steve Chen has said that live video should become available on YouTube by the end of this year.
Steve Chen – YouTube Co-Founder
In response to Sarah Meyers‘s question on the subject, Chen responded, “2008. We’ll do it this year. . . . Live video is just something that we’ve always wanted to do, we’ve never had the resources to do it correctly, but now with Google, we hope to actually do it this year.”
Of course, when a person says they “hope to actually do it” sometime within the next nine months, you don’t bet your house on “it” happening. The financial and technical support may not be in place, despite Chen’s wishes.
Also, there’s the matter of whether YouTube should offer live video. A lack of editing isn’t likely to do viewers any favors; there’s enough boring and/or stupid content on the site already. Furthermore, my colleague David Utter pointed out that the interest of an industry starting with “p” and ending with “orn” could complicate things for advertisers and YouTube admin alike.
Meh. We’ll see what happens. Yahoo is already testing live video’s waters, so perhaps Google and YouTube will learn from its experience and have a great product from the get-go.
