YouTube’s Live Video Streaming Service Takes on Amazon in May

According to a May 21 post by YouTube, Google’s (GOOG) (GOOGL) video platform, YouTube will now provide live video streaming service at 60fps (frames per second). This is good news, especially for gamers who don’t want any lags or slowdowns when they play live video games. This advance is also important for YouTube if it wants to attract more users to its service.

Currently, YouTube is a small player in the live video streaming space. Overall, YouTube is second only to Netflix (NFLX) in terms of the North American share of downstream Internet traffic.

The largest player in the live video streaming space is Twitch, which Amazon (AMZN) acquired for ~$1 billion in August 2014. Twitch is a popular website for video game enthusiasts who want to broadcast their video games to other people or watch other people play video games in real time.

As you can see in the above chart, Twitch drives the highest live video streaming volume in the United States. Its share in this segment is about 44%. Another popular player, ESPN, ranks fifth in this segment. ESPN is owned as a joint venture by Disney (DIS) and Hearst Corporation. By introducing live video streaming service at 60fps, YouTube aims to give competition in this space to Amazon’s Twitch.

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