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YouTube Live Rolls out Pay-Per-View Services

  • Posted By Staff Writer
  • April 11, 2012

YouTube has just made itself more indispensible to both private and commercial media users by monetizing its live streaming with pay-per-view services. Having experimented successfully with live streaming technology for the last year, including airing UFC fights, YouTube is now making this service available for interested distributors, making it part of YouTube Live. Although currently limited to Canada, the US, the UK, Japan and France, this service will soon be available to all members of the YouTube Partners program.

In an era of viral videos and click to stream software, this comes as exciting news.  YouTube has concentrated on making their pay-per-view application easy to use so amateur as well as professional producers have an opportunity to get involved. Producers can charge on a pay-per-view basis and even stream advertising to monetize their broadcast.

There are several ways to customize the pay-per-view service. Prices can be set by country and YouTube offers real-time analysis of the video, including viewing duration and geographic distribution of viewers. To help create videos, at no charge to users, Telestream has partnered with Google to offer Wirecast as the official live streaming software for YouTube Live. This powerful production software provides users with the ability to produce live broadcasts with special effects and shifting camera angles empowering  anyone to create compelling live content without spending a fortune on professional  equipment or virtual studio software. All of this is part of an effort to make YouTube Live a one-stop pay-per-view service.

Although YouTube isn’t the first to offer this service, the number of users per month (in the billions) overshadows the monthly users of its competitors like Ustream (in the millions). Since YouTube is a trusted source of video entertainment, as well as being relatively free of spam, this is good news for both media viewers and producers. It may be some time before it is universally available, but as YouTube stated in its blog, it takes time to roll out a service like this.

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