14 DAY TRIAL // If you're going to watch the video I embedded (and you will or else you wouldn't be reading this), you're going to catch the tone of the answer Chad Hurley, one of the co-founders of YouTube, gave when asked whether his company was working on streaming video. "We're working on a lot of interesting things", he said. That's neither denying, nor confirming the possibility.
For the recent start-ups that have gone into the streaming business, just mentioning this possibility (of YouTube thinking about it) would be enough to make their founders sick and stay in bed for a week. It would be the end of their business altogether, you can't blame them for the eventual reaction.
Please excuse the quality of the video, it was streamed live from a phone using Qik and that was basically the point of Robert Scoble, the man behind the "cam" asking the question - to show off the ability to stream video live from a cell phone to the Internet, which is something that Big videos sharing Brother YouTube can't do? for now.
Seeing where the industry is going, streaming live video is the natural progression path to be going on, but the quality at which this is done turns out to be lacking big time. The way I see it, first comes the decompression of video uploaded this far on YouTube and then and only then the work on streaming. Nevertheless, at the bandwidth available at the moment, there is virtually no logistical way in the near future to have such live streaming on a large site like YouTube and for it to have good quality.
Of course, it would be a great idea for YouTube to be entering this share of the market and I'm kind of taking this for granted, but I wonder what the other "lot of interesting things" that Chad Hurley mentioned are?