Olympics show YouTube’s potential as live-streaming platform

Mashable | The Hollywood Reporter
The Olympics shows how YouTube is shifting from an on-demand video platform to one aimed at live-streaming newsworthy events, reports Mashable’s Sam Laird. About 2.7 million people turned to YouTube to see the U.S. women’s gymnastics team win gold and the 200-meter IM race in which Ryan Lochte beat Michael Phelps. YouTube built a new streaming platform for the Olympics, according to Laird. Jason Gaedtke, YouTube’s director of software engineering, tells him:

“We certainly see strong demand in a couple verticals: gaming, sports, news increasingly — anything with a realtime or community-driven aspect to it seems to play well in this format.”

In July, PEJ reported that YouTube has emerged as an important platform for news.

The Hollywood Reporter’s Andrew Tyndall focuses on YouTube in addressing CNN’s ratings woes. The Web is CNN’s future, he writes:

CNN’s lack of ideological turf has harmed it in the ratings war as a cable news channel but helps it online, where video content, not an anchor’s politics or tone of voice, is key. CNN’s future rival is YouTube, not Fox News. …

CNN needs to go to CNN.com to find out how video news succeeds online then reverse-engineer that content for cable television.

Meanwhile, NBC Sports Group executive Seth Winter tells Ad Age’s Brian Steinberg that Olympics ratings show the success of its delayed broadcast. “If there were a modicum of concern regarding the impact of live streaming on television, we have completely eradicated that.”

Related: Gold medal for Olympics news site goes to New York Times; Guardian, BBC get silver and bronze (ReadWriteWeb) | Three Gannett TV stations are top-rated during Olympics (TVNewsCheck) | Tampa NBC’s “The Olympic Zone” blurs advertising and news (Poynter’s Tampa Bay Times) | NBC should make Olympics programming so easy to find, “there will be no incentive to hack illicit streams of the BBC or browse torrent sites” (Ad Age) | Harsh New York Times profile of Lolo Jones was right about “the outsized value for female athletes of being gorgeous” (Slate)