YouTube moves from video to live streaming

MUMBAI, INDIA: Google India’s announcement to provide live streaming of the Indian Premier Leagues (IPL) cricket matches on YouTube seems to be more oriented towards global audience.

According to Shailesh Rao, managing director of Google India, Media and Platforms - Asia Pacific, YouTube videos are viewed by around 400 million users globally and the plan is to tap these users for the live streams of IPL cricket matches. While, in India, about 10 million users view YouTube and the number is growing, according to Rao.

“It will allow the users to view the cricket matches at any time as per their convenience with the availability of clips and highlights on demand for 24x7 basis throughout the year and will overcome the time barriers for viewers from other countries,” Rao said.

From Google’s perspective, for the first time, it will be streaming live feed on YouTube in its history. For the first time, it will be involved a major sporting event which has global impact and audience spread across geographies.

“It will create an immersive multi-level experience to view sports on YouTube,” Rao noted.

In order to provide the live streams of 60 matches over 45 days during IPL’s third edition will require Google to further add and enhance its technology,IT resources and capabilities.

“It will be a significant global effort by technical, marketing and sales teams from the UK, US, Australia and other regions. It will be the most extensive live streaming ever done,” Rao explained.

However, Rao’s vision of immersive multi-level experience to view sports on YouTube seems to be far from reality particularly in the Indian context.

This because, India still has low PC and Internet penetration compared to other developing countries and it struggles to provide high-speed broadband connectivity across the nation. Hence the users would prefer to glue to their television sets to watch the cricket match and not on the Internet.

But for global audience who have high-speed Internet connectivity, certainly this will give the immersive multi-level experience.

“The impact is not India specific, and it’s global to every one world over,” Gautam Anand, Google’ director Content Partnerships, Asia Pacific pointed out.

At large for the Indian users, particularly for the office goers, it gives a new option to keep a tab of the cricket matches with live visuals rather than reading and scrolling the running commentary on cricketing websites.

Let's wait and watch what would be the impact of this live streaming on YouTube.