This now puts YouTube, which already gets around 2 billion video views every day, up against Internet and other television services and in direct competition with them.

In a press-release today the company said…

Today we’re announcing the initial roll out of YouTube Live, which will integrate live streaming capabilities and discovery tools directly into the YouTube platform for the first time. This begins with a new YouTube Live browse page (www.youtube.com/live), where you can always find the most compelling live events happening on YouTube and add events to your calendar. Subscribe to your favorite YouTube live-streaming partners to be notified of upcoming live streams on your customized homepage.

Today, we’ll also start gradually rolling out our live streaming beta platform, which will allow certain YouTube partners with accounts in good standing to stream live content on YouTube. The goal is to provide thousands of partners with the capability to live stream from their channels in the months ahead. In order to ensure a great live stream viewing experience, we’ll roll this offering out incrementally over time.

It’s inevitable that live video streamed via YouTube will be tremendously popular and it opens opportunities for concerts, major sporting events, big name interviews and movie promos to be shown to far wider audiences than can currently be reached.

Imaging, for instance, what difference it will make being able to stream live World Cup or other sporting events that may only be available on pay-per-view television channels.  This also raises the question about whether YouTube will in time allow providers to charge to view live content.

YouTube Live has launched with programmes already being broadcast so there’s plenty there to see from the off.  There are also large numbers of events and programmes scheduled for broadcast on the service.  It is going to be en exciting year for Internet Video with huge opportunities ahead and, perhaps, even a live stream of another cat playing the piano.

Ustream is a live interactive video broadcast platform that enables virtually anyone with a camera and an Internet connection to create their own video and broadcast it to a global audience. Ustream is both quick and easy to setup and use. The site claims that creating a channel takes as little as two minutes.

Ustream’s interactive broadcast functionality has a one-to-many capability, allowing the broadcaster to interact with viewers as well as viewers to interact with each other. If you want to broadcast your own show, you do have to be a registered user but this is no different from having to register to upload YouTube videos.

Ustream has already gained a lot of popularity thanks in part to having being used by virtually every candidate in the U.S. Presidential elections. Other prominent broadcasters listed are celebs like Miley Cyrus, cast members of ‘Friends’, and Johnny Knoxville. Ustream has also been used to broadcast events like this year’s SXSW and the UN climate change summit at Bali.

I don’t really see many disadvantages of UStream’s service except for the obvious one of needing a reasonably fast Internet connection. I also wonder if it’s possible to prerecord a show and broadcast it at a specified time.

What do you think of Ustream? Have you used this or another similar service before? What do you think of individuals broadcasting their own content? Let me know in the comments.