A couple of months back one of the founders of YouTube, Steve Chen, somewhat excitedly announced on video with pretty blogger, Sarah Meyers, that YouTube would be offering a Live version.
There was considerable amount of excitement around this, and a fair amount of terror in the companies that are in the live video space currently.
It appears from an unnamed source quoted on Silicon Alley that he spoke out of turn.
Google’s accountants look like they’ve got involved and called a halt to it, given the tons of extra bandwidth that would be needed … and paid for.
Alley claim that “YouTube execs estimated that if just 10% of the service’s users took advantage of live streaming, the company would have to add 20% to 25% to its huge server and bandwidth infrastructure to support it.”
Given the huge amount of people using YouTube, that’s a serious impact, especially when you’re spending more money than you’re earning.