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.

Read the following before you start complaining that it surely is like all the other video search engines out there: Microsoft Live Video Search has a very interesting preview features. If you hover the mouse over a video it will play a 30 second long preview of that video in the box that was occupied by the video thumbnail.

This is an excellent way of previewing many videos in short time without having to load them on separate pages. This is not only working on video search results pages but also on single video pages when hovering over related videos.

This instant preview feature speeds up the process of finding relevant videos. There are not really any other features worth meaning, Microsoft seems to have kept it as simplistic as possible.