Under Google's ownership, YouTube has been announcing and releasing some great new products. Last week, they changed their homepage so that it is now more TV like. It also leaked that Google will be spending 100 million dollars on new programming that will play exclusively on YouTube.

Now, YouTube announced its latest product release YouTube Live, a new live-streaming platform and a home page for live content on the site.

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.
This is a very interesting strategic change to YouTube that Google is trying. By going to live streams and a new homepage, they are setting up the ability to force watching commercials and to focus some attention on professionally produced content instead of just homemade content. This has the potential to be huge and will likely introduce new competition to other streaming sites like hulu and even the network station sites themselves.

Now, its just up to us to figure out how to take advantage of this :-)