Tag Archives: YouTube

News

YouTube creates gaming platform, Twitch pwns with swift response

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YouTube is launching an entirely new website for gamers — except, it’s not exactly grundbreaking.

YouTube announced a platform called Gaming on Friday, a separate website and app for its gaming community. It will be available in the U.S. and UK at some point this summer, with a special preview next week for E3 attendees.

Each game will get its own home where users can find streams, walkthroughs and other videos specific to that title, with content also coming from publishers and popular YouTube gaming personalities. Users can add games to their “collections,” similar to how they would subscribe to a channel and receive notifications whenever channels they follow begin a live stream.

Sound familiar? Twitch, the massive game streaming platform and community that Google was rumored to acquire last year (before ultimately getting purchased by Amazon), thinks so.

Continue reading YouTube creates gaming platform, Twitch pwns with swift response →

News, Twitch

YouTube vs Twitch Gets Real

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Today, Twitch is the default service when it comes to streaming video games on the internet. Tomorrow? It might be Google. Maybe.

YouTube just announced a number of improvements to its streaming capabilities that are going to be of interest to anyone who plays games in front of other people.

Google’s video service now supports 60fps streaming in both 1080p and 720p, same as Twitch, but because it’s YouTube, it also supports HTML5 playback, which not only uses less resources than flash (which Twitch is stuck with), but lets you do this:

As of this week, YouTube live streams will use an HTML5 player in supported browsers. And because our HTML5 player supports variable speed playback, you can skip backward in a stream while it’s live and watch at 1.5x or 2x speed to catch back up.

Handy. Whether it convinces anyone currently using Twitch for its community (and established celebrities) and god-awful chat, though, is another matter.

Originally posted on Kotaku

Streaming

YouTube to Relaunch Live Streaming

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Inside sources have released information regarding YouTube’s intention to launch its own live streaming platform

Inside sources have reported for The Daily Dot that YouTube is bound to reintroduce its streaming platform.

After rumors suggesting that YouTube might acquire the famous video game streaming platform known as Twitch were scattered by the fact that Amazon ended up buying the gaming platform, with the reasons behind this change of plans remaining unknown to this date, YouTube seems prepared to start anew.

But the thing is that if YouTube does initiate a streaming service mainly focused on gaming, then it will most definitely have to compete with Twitch.

YouTube has done live streaming before

It is not the first time YouTube is experimenting with live streaming, as it has broadcast some important events before, but the idea didn’t really take off, so the platform stopped promoting this type of services.

Furthermore, YouTube is no stranger to gaming, as there are many famous YouTube channels dedicated to video gaming, although most of them are pre-recorded.

Nonetheless, one of the best known is also the most subscribed to: PewDiePie, which has garnered more than 30 million subscribers and approximately 8 billion views. Other gaming channels just as famous as the one mentioned above are VanossGaming, Sky Does Minecraft or Vegetta777.

However, by now YouTube should be perfectly aware of the fact that, if it does go through with the live streaming idea, it will have some hard time fighting against Twitch, a platform which has gained so much influence so far.

An inside representative declared for The Daily Dot that “Gaming and esports in particular are going to be a big driving force for the new-look YouTube Live. There’ll be huge opportunities for established streamers and organizations soon and I would say that the record numbers of esports viewers are only going to grow when Google start promoting and partnering with these events.”

And if the fact that Google will handle the promotions is true, then YouTube Live might have a huge advantage over the world’s leading video platform.

What’s more, the YouTube Live service is expected to come into being sometime in June, at the E3 2015, the annual video game conference and show in Los Angeles.

People and gamers in particular are looking forward to this event to see what YouTube will put forward and how it plans to compete with the major existing force on the market.

Originally posted on Softpedia

Photo credits: YouTube

News, Twitch

Microsoft’s New YouTube and Twitch Rules Don’t Apply to Minecraft

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You can make YouTube videos with Microsoft’s games as long as they’re not lewd or Pornographic.

Microsoft has updated its Game Content Usage Rules page to explain how people can use its game content to create YouTube videos and Twitch Streams, but the new rules don’t apply to Minecraft, which Microsoft acquired last year for $2.5 billion.

The new policy states that Microsoft allows users to create derivative works based on its games strictly for personal, non-commercial use, as long as they follow a set of rules. Some of these rules prohibit users from reverse engineering games to “access the assets or otherwise do things that the games don’t normally permit,” or creating content that is “pornographic, lewd, obscene, vulgar, discriminatory (on the basis of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc.), illegal, hate speech, promoting violence, drug use or any illegal activity, promoting crimes against humanity, genocide or torture, or is otherwise objectionable.”

“Whether an Item is ‘objectionable; is up to us, but you can expect us to be concerned if a significant number of people in the game’s community or the public at large report the content as offensive,” Microsoft said.

You also can’t earn compensation with derivative works by selling it or through advertisements, unless you’re posting it to YouTube and Twitch.

The new rules apply to all of Microsoft’s products except Minecraft, which retains its own guidelines. The rules are not that different (mostly common sense in both cases), but Minecraft is a bit more lax, allowing users to create and sell whatever content they want as long as its clear that it’s not an official Minecraft product.