I hate to add yet another post in the blogsphere about YouTube’s live event from this past weekend, but I really have to ask, does anyone really care about it? It’s not a big deal. Over the past ten years there have been a lot of live broadcasts on the web with music and entertainment acts. YouTube has no business model and can’t figure out how to make money, even with all of their traffic, yet people are excited that YouTube did a live webcast as if this is some new, cutting-edge trend.

And why is there so much talk about how the webcast was delivered? I see all these posts talking about how YouTube worked with Akamai as if that is some sort of big news and people seem all surprised. Of course YouTube did not stream the event themselves and used a CDN. Who did they think was going to do this? Even TechCrunch says, “We’d heard rumors that Google had partnered with one of the big three live streaming services – Mogulus, Ustream or Justin.TV“, “But instead of working with them, or building their own streaming media CDN, they chose to work with Akamai.” Who does TechCrunch think Mogulus, Ustream and Justin.TV uses when they do large-scale live events? They aren’t CDNs either. So even if one of them was “used”, the event would have gone through Akamai, Limelight or another third party anyway. Why is anyone surprised by any of this? How is this a story?

I think too many people were expecting YouTube to roll out their own webcasting service, which makes no sense. If YouTube were to do that, they would not do it via their own network and would have to use a content delivery network. But the bigger question is does YouTube really need a live service? Absolutely not. If they can’t make money with on-demand video, they won’t make it with live content either. More>>

Disclosure: Dan Rayburn is a Principal Analyst at Frost & Sullivan