YouTube Live
Tuesday, November 25, 2008 at 3:33PM YouTube held a live event this past Saturday featuring 50 performers from San Francisco. Reports indicate that 700K streamed the event live and an additional 2.5M have since downloaded parts of the event. Akamai was called upon to provide the streaming and according to sources did a very good job.
The live streaming space has come a long way from the first few Broadcast.com events. YouTube did very little if any paid promotion for the event and the 700K number is a very respectable as it would be a .5 national rating if measured via traditional television ratings. I am assuming most of this audience was comprised of the 18-34 audience which is highly coveted by advertisers. The 700K number in the 18-34 audience would be equal to approximately 40-50% of NBC, CBS and Fox's audience on any given weekday evening.
It will be interesting to see if YouTube looks to start doing live events or if this was a one time experiment...based on the results I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes a once a week/month type of advertising supported programming.
Here is one of the performers from the event:
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