YouTube extends its live-streaming experiment

YouTube, a unit of Google, took another step toward widespread live video-streaming on Monday, testing it with four Web video companies in a two-day trial.

The four companies, Howcast, Next New Networks, Rocketboom and Young Hollywood, started live-streaming on Monday morning.

YouTube, the world's largest video Web site, has slowly entered the business of live-streams, a corner of the Web populated by upstart companies like UStream and Livestream. Its first live event was a concert in San Francisco in November 2008. Since then, it has streamed the State of the Union address, a question-and-answer session with President Obama and a number of live sporting events.

But it has not enabled users to live-stream until now. "Based on the results of this initial test, we'll evaluate rolling out the platform more broadly to our partners worldwide," the company said in a blog post Monday.

Rocketboom, one of the four partners, said it had created three hourlong live shows for the two-day test period. It said it would post technical explanations about its broadcasts on its research and development page.

Similarly, Howcast said it had scheduled three live shows Monday and Tuesday. Jason Liebman, the chief executive and co-founder of Howcast, said in an e-mail that users were "growing more comfortable with and interested in live content broadcasts," citing ComScore data that showed a nearly 650 percent climb in live-streaming over the last year.