A handful of the most memorable moments from YouTube Live.

I watched the YouTube Live event online last night and apparently I was one of 700,000 others that did the same. The star studded cast produced as a "part concert, part variety show, and part party" moved through a tightly packed script with no commercial breaks. It was MC'd by YouTube's Vlog Squad and featured a range of musical guests and viral video stars to celebrate YouTube's user community. The webcast player also featured "Live Cams" with alternate cameras to view the main stage, back stage and offstage. Those feeds were streamed live in smalller video windows under the main stage feed. It looked very similar to BitGravity's new multiview product. From a user experience standpoint, my live steam was consistent with little or no interruption of service. I watched it in both medium and high quality and the high quality stream looked great at my meager 200 kbps download speed. There had been a lot of speculation on who Google/YouTube would partner with on the event and on the Mogulus blog Max Haot said, "If I was to speculate, I think that Youtube will use an established and traditional content delivery network (CDN) such as Akamai who can cover the Tokyo event too and build a simple Flash player themselves. Google would pay the CDN premium fees for bandwidth for it. They probably contracted multiple CDNs to ensure scalability and have insurance if one has trouble with the load." He noted that it would be too risky for YouTube to stream their first ever live event with Ustream who has not yet proven to have capacity beyond more than 80,000 streams. He later confirmed after the event was live that,"by looking at the player and HTML code, we found that our prediction was correct. YouTube is not launching any live service and has chosen AKAMAI to stream this one-off event using a custom Flash player built by web agency Digitaria (See the publishing points used by the player http://live.youtube.digitaria.com/site/streams.xml - edgefcs.net is registered to AKAMAI)" Ben Homer of Online Video Watch ...