Written by Liz Gannes
Posted Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 9:45 AM PT

March Madness! YouTube Gets Live Video Via Silverlight

So live video has finally, finally come to YouTube this morning. CBS has embedded its Silverlight March Madness bracket and live game coverage directly onto a YouTube channel. Go to http://www.youtube.com/marchmadness to check it out. Butler-LSU just started, and it looks great. The Silverlight player looks exactly the same as on the free March Madness on Demand site — it’s just on YouTube. Archived videos on the page appear to be hosted by YouTube.

YouTube has not offered live video to its users, in part because it would be a serious infrastructure demand and expense with the site’s massive audience. But we’ve heard from people at the company who were upset they missed out on big live video events like the Obama Inauguration. Not being able to participate in real-time kind of steals the biggest video site in the world’s thunder. YouTube used Akamai to live stream its own user festival to hundreds of thousands of viewers last year, but that seems to have been a one-off.

It’s also worth noting that, until today, YouTube has mandated that content providers use its own player and hosting service. If the site becomes more flexible about allowing outside players and hosting, it could have a lot more luck negotiating with major media companies.

It’s also pretty funny that Microsoft is powering Google’s first real live video offering. And we just saw a promo for CBS’s competing video site TV.com.

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Topic: Online Video

Comments (6)

I find it funny that youtube wants us to use IE for accessing the marchmadness site

Sidharth — 10:14 AM on March 19, 2009 Reply
YouTube really has nothing to do with it. They merely put up a page that has an IFRAME pointing to http://mmod.ncaa.com/video. It’s not actually embedding Silverlight. Soplease don’t make the mistake of thinking this is bigger than it is…

Will — 11:11 AM on March 19, 2009 Reply
- @Will — I feel like that’s pretty much the same thing. And not something YouTube would normally do.
  
  Liz Gannes, NewTeeVee — 11:15 AM on March 19, 2009 Reply
Fair, but just because my company puts an IFRAME around a Google page, I wouldn’t say my company “chooses Google as a search provider” cuz Google doesn’t even know if I do that. I guess it’s all about branding…

Will — 11:47 AM on March 19, 2009 Reply
@Sidharth:
Silverlight doesn’t require IE. It runs just fine in Firefox, Safari, and even Chrome. It’s designed to be a cross-browser, cross-platform plugin.

Alex Zambelli — 4:11 PM on March 30, 2009 Reply
hi im icheal jackson i like to dance and to dance and create videos

Michael Jackson — 3:28 PM on July 19, 2009 Reply

Linkbacks (26)

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YouTube Goes Live, Thanks to Microsoft — 10:05 AM on March 19, 2009
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[...] CBS Leverages Silverlight for YouTube NCAA March Madness Site Microsoft Silverlight may not be the first solution you think of when considering how YouTube might stream live TV. But in fact that’s exactly what CBS used on their NCAA March Madness On Demand YouTube channel. It appears that the player and feeds for audio and video are coming direct from CBS, and upon further examination the Silverlight-powered player is identical to the one offered on CBS’ own March Madness site. We first heard about this new offering from a post on NewTeeVee. [...]

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Shaz3e » Blog Archive » YouTube… — 8:07 PM on March 19, 2009
[...] Microsoft Silverlight may not be the first solution you think of when considering how YouTube might stream live TV. But in fact that’s exactly what CBS used on their NCAA March Madness On Demand YouTube channel. It appears that the player and feeds for audio and video are coming direct from CBS, and upon further examination the Silverlight-powered player is identical to the one offered on CBS’ own March Madness site. We first heard about this new offering from a post on NewTeeVee. [...]

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[...] 在你看来，Youtube上电视直播的首选解决方案可能还轮不上微软的Silverlight技术。但是，CBS在 Youtube上的频道——美国大学联盟锦标赛（NCAA）使用的就是Silverlight的播放器。频道上面的播放器，以及音频和视频都是直接来自 CBS网站，我们做进一步确认后，发现这上面的Silverlight播放器跟CBS自己站点上提供的播放器属同一播放器。我们最先是从NewTeeVe上的一个帖子得的这一消息的。 [...]

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