YouTube reportedly plans to support live 360-degree videos

PanARMENIAN.Net - YouTube is developing the capability to livestream 360-degree video on its platform, BuzzFeed News reports exclusively.

Multiple sources familiar with the company’s plans confirmed YouTube has been meeting with 360-degree camera manufacturers about adding support for immersive live-streamed video broadcasts to its platform. The launch timeline remains unclear, BuzzFeed says.

Live 360-degree video would be the latest in a series of moves the company has made since launching 360-degree video last March, in an attempt to own the next big video format. In June, it launched support for Google Cardboard, which lets viewers experience 360-degree videos by converting their smartphones into basic headsets. In November, YouTube debuted 3D capabilities — what it calls “virtual reality videos” — that are only available in Google Cardboard and give immersive videos a sense of depth not possible with straightforward 360-degree video. This month, it hired a “Global VR Evangelist” to recruit more content partners to develop VR content for its platform. Live 360-degree video would be perhaps the biggest step its taken since first launching support for the format.

Currently, certain 360-degree cameras can live-stream content, but the video feeds they create aren’t broadcast quality; they’re intended to give camera operators a quick and dirty sense of the video they’re capturing. What YouTube is in the process of creating is a platform for broadcasting live 360-degree video to a global audience. And the difficulties associated with making that happen are prodigious.

A 360-degree video is typically created from multiple videos that must be spliced together. Most 360-degree cameras have two or more wide-angle lenses, each doing its own video capture. The videos from these lenses are then “stitched” together in post-production to create a spherical image. Live-streaming 360-degree video might require that stitching process to occur in real time.