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Advantages & Disadvantages of Live Streaming Video on YouTube

Advantages & Disadvantages of Live Streaming Video on YouTube

The live streaming industry is set to grow to more than $184B by 2027. If your business isn’t using live video streaming to its advantage before then, you could miss out on huge opportunities for audience growth. But one of the most important decisions you can make in regards to live video streaming is which platform you use. If you’re thinking about using YouTube for your streaming needs, you might want to consider these advantages and disadvantages of live streaming video on YouTube before you get started!

Like any third-party live streaming platform provider, YouTube has its benefits and its potential pitfalls. You can’t always have everything you want in a third-party platform, especially not one that’s free like YouTube Live!  To help you decide whether YouTube is the right live streaming platform for your business, we’ve put together a list of the most popularly cited advantages to live streaming video on YouTube and some of the most commonly cited disadvantages to using this platform.

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Advantages of Live Streaming Video on YouTube

With more than 1.9B active users each month, YouTube and its live streaming platform YouTube Live certainly have several benefits for users. The potential for a wide audience of YouTube viewers alone is huge for the average business that’s thinking about live streaming video on YouTube, but what about other advantages that can directly be tied to the YouTube Live platform?

Business owners that choose to stream from YouTube Live have the advantage of reaching the giant’s 1.9B active monthly users, but the advantages go beyond the audience. YouTube Live is incredibly cost-advantageous being that it’s free! In fact, content creators can actually use the platform to live stream for free and they can then monetize their streams to make real profits. Few platforms provide such a substantial value, that’s for sure!

YouTube Live is also great for establishing your brand. In fact, a Hubspot survey found that not only do businesses that take to live streaming video on YouTube benefit from YouTube’s massive audience, but that 70% of the audience will actually make purchase decisions based on what they watch. This means that businesses that choose to live stream in YouTube Live have a strong potential to generate sales as a direct result of their streaming, too!

Posting video content to YouTube maximizes your reach as the platform actually gives preference to live videos over pre-recorded video posts. In fact, live streaming video on YouTube even provides businesses with the advantage of mobile streaming, collaboration with other creators, and the ability to connect to a massive audience. In many ways, you really can’t go wrong with the decision to live stream video on YouTube, that is…unless you find yourself dealing with the potential disadvantages of the platform.

Disadvantages of Live Streaming Video on YouTube

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For all the great things that are provided by YouTube Live, there are equally negative aspects to the platform. Certainly the advantages do stand above and before the disadvantages, but that’s not to say that YouTube Live is without flaws. Broadcasting on YouTube does have some problems for business owners, particularly in regards to quality, flexibility, and the ability to share content once it’s been broadcasted live.

One of the biggest disadvantages of YouTube Live is the fact that the platform compromises the overall quality of the live video that is produced. Viewers are forced to choose between real-time engagement and viewing high quality video, they simply cannot have both. If a viewer chooses to engage, they are immediately forced to view a lower quality video stream. If the viewer chooses to view the higher quality footage, then they cannot engage in real-time. There are no in-betweens.

Another major disadvantage to live streaming video on YouTube is the fact that live streams are hard to share. You can’t just share your YouTube Live stream on another platform like your Facebook group or Twitter feed. Doing so will disconnect you from your stream. This makes it incredibly difficult to build a stronger, more robust, and versatile community because you can’t take advantage of other social platforms in order to post your live.

YouTube also lacks flexibility. Not only are there not nearly enough tools in the YouTube Live platform, businesses that consider live streaming video on YouTube will quickly find that they don’t have control over their feed. They cannot utilize features that many other live video platforms offer like picture-in-picture or multi-camera streaming nor are they able to incorporate their own unique branding elements across the feed. It’s these disadvantages to YouTube Live that likely upset business owners the most!

Fortunately, live streaming video on YouTube does provide a relatively low-barrier to entry, easy to use option for new businesses that are interested in utilizing the YouTube Live feature. For those who are looking for a more robust environment that allows full flexibility and control, there are other paid platforms that likely would provide a better user experience. Give Beverly Boy Productions a call to learn about the live video streaming platform that’s right for your business. 

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