YouTube has hosted its first ever live streaming event, a music and variety show that featured performers who found notoriety after posting their clips on the video sharing site.The event, held at the Fort Mason Centre's Herbst Pavillion in San Francisco, was described by YouTube as a "celebration of... the vibrant communities that exist on the site, including bedroom vloggers, budding creatives, underground athletes and world famous musicians."
Among the audience of 3,000 people that turned out for the event were YouTube favourites Beardyman, the Brighton based human beatbox, Ask a Ninja, and Lucas Cruickshank, the 15 year old creator of Fred, a hyperactive child who's adventures have helped make him on of YouTube's most popular characters.
Will.i.am and Kate Perry, whose worldwide hit single "I Kissed a Girl" was first discovered on YouTube were also at the event to perform live.
It wasn't just the people who found fame on YouTube who attended the celebratory event, as one of the site's originators, Chad Hurley, was there along with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google who purchased YouTube in 2006 for more than $1.5 billion.
Despite some critics attending the event suggesting that while some of the individual performances work in the intimate context of a video, they don't translate well in front of a live audience such as the one that packed the Herbst Pavillion, the general public tended to react positively.
According to TechCrunch, YouTube did 700,000 streams of the live event via Akamai, the streaming media service. While this number is impressive, it's still dwarfed by MSN streaming the Live Earth Concert in 2007 which reached more than 10 million viewers.
The success of the YouTube live event in San Francisco doesn't look like it will be matched by the second event, scheduled to take place in Tokyo, Japan. Mike Abundo, a tech and media expert, wrote: "Whereas YouTube Live in San Francisco attracted 700,000 concurrent live viewers, YouTube Live Tokyo attracts none - because it's not even live. The show was supposed to start at 3pm Japan Standard Time. It is now 7:56pm in Japan, and there's nary a stream in sight."
Instead of streaming video, all those attempting to view the Japanese event saw were "...periodic uploads of clips, with artists performing on a cute but cramped YouTube-themed stage."
Despite the shortcomings of YouTube Live Tokyo, the San Franciscan event maintained a positive atmosphere throughout, with the event reminding everyone of the hundreds of rags to riches stories that posting videos on YouTube has led to.
Juan Mann was one of the website's stars who made the trip from Sydney to San Francisco for YouTube Live. In 2006, a film of Mann wandering around a shopping centre carrying a sign which offered free hugs to all comers was uploaded onto YouTube and quickly become a worldwide hit. Mann admitted to being friendless and aimless at the time of filming the video.
Mann told the Guardian, "One week I was washing dishes in Sydney, the next week I was on the Oprah Winfrey Show. I have friends, I have a fiancée, I have a purpose. And I have never washed dishes since. Unless they're my own of course."
