YouTube has officially launched their gaming channel and it allows gamers to post up more than just Let's Play videos and video commentary. YouTube has elevated their game to include live-streaming in their line-up.
The service just went live recently, as reported by Gamespot, and it features an entirely new sub-section of YouTube dedicated to gaming with more than 25,000 game pages. It's located at Gaming.YouTube.com and it offers gamers instant access to the most popular live-streamers on the service, as well as some of the top games currently available or soon coming to the market, such as Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, which is currently streaming at the moment.
The biggest difference between YouTube streaming and Twitch streaming is that YouTube offers higher bitrates, transcoding and the ability to quickly rewind. The rewind feature is probably one of the most important features not present in the Twitch controls, forcing gamers to have to click through the stream feed to find the spot that they missed or hope that an archive will go up so they can go back and attempt to find the spot that they wanted to re-watch.
With Amazon behind Twitch it would seem like some of the common features present in YouTube's line-up of controls would have been added to the long running streaming service by now. Yet, some of those tools are not present for some odd reason.
Another difference between YouTube and Twitch is that there are non-streaming videos intermixed on the main page to help give gamers something else to view apart from the live-streams. You can see that there are videos spanning the gaming universe from live-action machinima to celebrating the culture of cosplayers. There is a lot of content present right there on the front page of YouTube Gaming, and viewers can easily select from the panels on the left to find their favorite game to start watching or choose from the panel on the right to watch their favorite live-streamer.
Additionally, YouTube allows for more games to be streamed than Twitch. As some of you may have heard games with a strong focus around sexually suggestive material can't be streamed on Twitch. For a while Senran Kagura games were all banned from Twitch until later on the company modified their stance after receiving lots of complaints and amended the policy so that gamers could stream Senran Kagura titles. AO rated games are also prohibited from being streamed on Twitch, so it's not possible to stream games like Manhunt 2 or Hatred.
On YouTube Gaming it is possible to stream Hatred, assuming people still play that game.
There has been one major drawback, however. A lot of people are worried about YouTube's strict Content ID policies. As many of you already know YouTube is very strict when it comes to copyrighted material being on display or being audible during a video. Many gamers fear that the live-streaming could be a financial hazard for regular streamers because playing licensed music could get the content pulled from YouTube. We'll see how it all turns out as the service gains some legs and attempts to work as an alternative to Twitch.tv.
