The Playstation 4 & Ustream: A Questionable Live-Streaming Partnership?

Yesterday evening, Sony finally held their much-rumoured Playstation 4 event, where many things were confirmed such as its ability to live-stream gameplay footage to friends, and presumably the internet.

Whilst I was both surprised and impressed at what I was hearing with regards to the streaming functionality, I always had one question running through my mind: “Why did they choose Ustream as the PS4’s streaming service and not the experience and install-base of Twitch.tv?”

For those that are unaware of the entire live-streaming world out there, Ustream and Justin.tv used to be toe-to-toe a few years ago as the two biggest broadcasting sites, however once Justin.tv split into two entities (one of them being  the videogame-focused Twitch.tv), Ustream just got blown out of the water. Since then, Twitch.tv has had an absolute stranglehold on the videogame live-streaming market, where their user-base is so large that it is not uncommon for competitive gaming streams to break 100,000+ simultaneous viewers.

So knowing this, I naturally couldn’t understand why on earth Sony would opt for using a service other than Twitch.tv for streaming videogames.

However that wasn’t the end of my questions. The conference went on to show that all recorded footage can be uploaded to Facebook, without a single mention of the obvious choice of Youtube. Naturally, I then thought: “Why not Youtube? It has the largest user-base of people that actually want to watch videos, as well as the fact that it has far better upload speeds and the necessary ability to search for videos instead of only seeing content from friends.”

Now, with these two questions in my mind, I was trying to figure out what could possibly be stopping Sony from picking the two obvious platforms (especially since Twitch.tv can already upload footage directly to Youtube). To which I have come up with four possible reasons:

1. Twitch.tv and Youtube were both too expensive to obtain as partners and/or Ustream was tempting in a “we can both help each other to grow” kind of way.
2. Twitch.tv and Youtube simply did not want any part of this venture for whatever reason.
3. Sony simply failed to mention Youtube, but it will be supported.
4. Somebody else (maybe Microsoft) has beaten Sony to the punch and has already claimed Twitch.tv and Youtube as partners for a live-streaming service that is set to rival the PS4’s.

Whilst it’s entirely possible for numbers 1 to 3 to be the case, the most interesting prospect would be if number 4 was true. Could Microsoft be cooking up a rival service that would (potentially) have greater expertise and muscle to crush the PS4’s offering? Or is all of this speculation just completely off-base?

Anyway, whilst I didn’t reach any particular conclusion in this post, I just thought that it was an interesting point to address and hopefully things will become clear (such as Microsoft’s plans) at this year’s E3 event in June.

 

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