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Youtube is going to relaunch its livestreaming service with a view to focus on live game streaming and esports, a new report claims.
Google, the company that owns YouTube, tried and failed to buy out game-streaming service Twitch last year, which suggests it’s been keen to enter the esports market for a while.
It seems, however, that Google is taking game streaming into its own hands, the Daily Dot reports several sources as saying.
“Gaming and esports in particular are going to be a big driving force for the new-look YouTube Live,” explained one of the sources.
“There’ll be huge opportunities for established streamers and organisations soon and I would say that the record number of esports viewers are only going to grow when Google start promoting and partnering with these events.”
YouTube first began trialling livestreaming services back in 2010, however there’s been little progress for the platform since.
Moreover, the video giant purged mentions of live events from the home page early last year, which clues that YouTube wasn’t happy with how things were going on the livestreaming front.
Related: 5 reasons why Amazon is buying Twitch
The sources suggested that YouTube now plans to go head-to-head with Twitch, a service so popular it draws in 100 million monthly viewers just by broadcasting gaming content.
This monopoly will be tough to crack, but the report details how YouTube has already recruited around 50 engineers ‘with expertise in the streaming industry’.
“The time is right as well, with Twitch moving into other areas such as music and so on. Google doesn’t want to be too far behind in the arms race,” explained a source.
It’s expected that Google will officially announce its newly refreshed livestreaming platform at the E3 gaming expo, due to run between June 16 and 18.
