Allen Weiner

As I walked through the Austin Farmers Market on November 22, a local organization was handing out flyers telling locals about the February 17, 2009 deadline for the analog to digital transition, the point at which time local broadcasters would cease analog transmissions. In short, death to rabbit ears. Now, here’s the irony: Nov. 22 will go down as the de facto day that the incumbent TV business died as it was the night YouTube Live aired on the web, streaming content to a reported 700,000 concurrent users using the resources of CDN, Akamai, and perhaps other bandwidth providers who are content to stay out of the headlines.

If you think about 700,000 concurrent users, that equates to the number of TV households in the number 44 market in the U.S., that being Albuquerque. That is households that have a television set, not actual viewers at any one given time. That number (called HUT, households using television) is always far less unless you’re talking about the Super Bowl or other mega event.

As far as content goes, this former TV critic thinks the show was pretty bad. User Generated Content as an art form does not translatewell into live television; for that matter, it doesn’t translate into much of anything. Nonetheless, the deployment of web TV technology was impressive. Google and its partners delivered a good-looking on-screen picture with very few frame freezes, even at full screen. There were three cameras, one on stage and two backstage and you could easily click from one to the other with only a slight delay. There was a comment board, but you needed to refresh to see the latest remarks. And, of course, there were ads/sponsors, including Virgin Airlines and Pure Digital (makers of the Flip camera). I didn’t like the fact that when you clicked on an ad, you were taken out of the live experience to another website. That will need to be improved in future live programs.

And that begs the question, what’s next for YouTube as a live web broadcaster. Anyone who thought that live was taking a back seat to on-demand streaming, overlooking the success of such efforts as Operation MySpace, and election night coverage from the BBC, CNN and Associated Press, should now be a true believer. 2009 will go down as the year that not only broadcasting transitioned from analog to digital, but also the year that web TV went live. Being able to provide robust live services could be what begins to thin out the ranks of Online Video Publishing Platform Providers.

As for Google/YouTube, one wonders if this was just an experiment/warning shot with Google flexing its muscles and saying “here’s what we can do if we decided to go into this business.” What we don’t know, and it’s doubtful Goo-tube will reveal this information, is what it cost to run this live event and whether it made any profit. Webcasters, broadcasters and consumers await what’s next with a mix of excitement and fear.