YouTube Gaming Could Just About Be the Best Thing to Ever Happen to Second Life, And I'll Tell You Why

Last week as I watched Jessica Pixel on her live YouTube Gaming channel (right here), it occurred to me it's just about the coolest way to use Second Life I've seen in quite awhile. In fact, I annotated a screengrab to try and help explain why:

A key problem with Second Life is that it's a walled garden, with all the great content within it difficult and time-consuming to find -- especially for people who've never used or even installed the client, let alone existing users. YouTube Gaming gets around that problem in all the ways you see above:

The channel owner has their own independent page, which comes "alive", so to speak, whenever they're streaming live. People from the web can not only watch the live stream, but interact with the channel owner via live chat. There's also an option to add a webcam feed, so you can also watch the channel owner in real life interact with SL and her web audience. This is seriously great, because it creates a personal sense of connection, which is often absent from mere avatar-to-avatar interactions (at least for non-users.) So with a single, scalable application, a core SL problem is solved, and the world instantly becomes way more appealing to all the many tens of millions of people already watching gaming videos on YouTube (with Minecraft being the most popular).

In fact, if I was running Linden Lab (and don't you wish I was), I'd put an official Linden-run YouTube Gaming channel right on the official homepage, and keep that stream live running 24/7 with fun, cool, constantly updated content. (And of course, occasional griefers, who'd have to be booted but quick - and come to think of it, booting them would be part of the entertainment.)

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Comments

[Pathfinder]

Jess, thanks so much for doing these streams of the Hypergrid Safari adventures. Great job!

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Umm Hamlet? Almost all streaming services have those features, including Twitch (back when they still allowed SL), Ustream and Hitbox. It's nothing specific to Youtube. The point you make in this post could be generalized to all streaming services.

[Wagner James Au]

... except YouTube has the largest user base by far of any of them, is integrated with Google and thus has better SEO for content by far, and like I said, YouTube's most-watched content by far is game footage.

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Yes, youtube is big, but it isn't big for "streaming"...yet. Frankly the streams there seem to be rather laggy and not up to twitch/ustream quality, at least for the PC based streams. Are people trying to stream on dual-cores or something? And there's still a lot of inertia around the already existing twitch/hitbox/ustream communities. After all, just because Google had Google+, it didn't mean everyone and their dog jumped from Facebook now did it?

[Amy]

CronoCloud Creeggan.......Google will probably just buy twitch if they have any technology issues

Excuse me while I find some small change behind the sofa......