If you didn’t hear, YouTube is doing a live web cast of a U2 concert this evening (October 25 if you’re on PST and October 26 if you’re on EST or other…). This is YouTube’s largest live web cast and the viewership is expected to be in the millions. Viewers can also connect via Twitter to Tweet out the experience as well.
I’ve setup http://www.U2Webcast.com so you can catch the hash tags, Tweets and grab the album in one place.
Whether you’re a fan of U2 or not, you can’t help but marvel in the amazingness of the technology. Personally, I’m not a fan but I’m tuned in right now watching people connect to each other and to the U2 broadcast in a way that makes our world much, much smaller. That is very cool.
It begs the question… will YouTube offer web casting in future to all of their users? With popular sites like Justin.tv, Ustream.tv, Blog TV and others dominating that market, perhaps they won’t move into that space but seeing this web cast and its success makes me think that they very well could… I’d love to see stats on YouTube’s normal viewer count compared to their viewer count during this concert.
Josh Lowensohn wrote an article on CNet.com about YouTube possibly moving into that space. Read it here. Michael Learmonth wrote an article about how they aren’t — read that article here. Opinions are split!
I think it would be a smart move. Considering YouTube is all about sharing content and the creation of new, fresh content, web casting and the recordings of these casts would encourage people to create even more new content. I suppose in doing so, the quality of the videos goes down (lets face it, live feeds are never quite as exciting as a pre-planned, edited video in most cases) but I think it would keep traffic on the site even more so.
What do you think? Think they’ll move into that space? Heard news that they are? Let me know — comment!
