Twitch vs. YouTube vs. Facebook for Free Live Streaming
By Jim Bask
YouTube
Let’s start with YouTube. While Facebook has gotten a lot of attention lately, YouTube offers some distinct advantages. Let’s consider audience first.
YouTube doesn’t have a newsfeed or pages or groups. All it has is video. Sure, there are channels and playlists, but they’re just a collection of videos. Even the discussions on YouTube are centered around videos.
So, it should come as no surprise that YouTube wants you to watch videos. In fact, they don’t care (for the most part) which videos you watch as long as you stay on YouTube to watch them.
With that said, newer videos tend to be more relevant to questions being asked, so YouTube tends to promote those. Since nothing is newer than live, anyone searching on YouTube (or Google for that matter) is likely to get some live, or recently live videos as part of the search.
That means that YouTube is good at showing videos to people who might be interested in them, but who have no prior relationship whatsoever with the creator.
This doesn’t come without a downside, though. Since Google is so huge and has such deep pockets, they’re a target for lawsuits. To combat this, Google created the contentID system for YouTube.
In negotiating with copyright owners, like record companies, they have created a system which enables their copyrighted works to be used or not and monetized or not. For most people, this system works fine. The problem comes when your church has permission, via the CCLI live-streaming license or the Christian Copyright Solutions’ license, to live stream copyrighted worship music, but YouTube doesn’t have a way to know that … or anyone to tell… read more