The game industry is approaching its biggest event of the year, E3. Developers, publishers, console makers, journalists and more descend upon the convention where some of the biggest announcements of the year are made. The key draws are always the press conferences from the big 3: Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony.
As has been customary in the past several years, these briefings will be streamed live by all of the big gaming sites including 1UP, GameSpot, GameTrailers and others, but this year, an even bigger name is getting into the game.
Gaming portal IGN has partnered with YouTube to stream the conferences and many other big events from the show floor. YouTube has been slowly dabbling in the waters of live event streaming, and this will be among their biggest experiments so far. TechCrunch speculates that this probably doesn’t point to a forthcoming launch of live streaming services for individuals, but it does show continued interest in the live streaming space.
While the content of each site"s stream of the briefings should be close to identical, YouTube has proven they can scale in an extremely reliable manner. So, if your outlet of choice"s stream isn"t handling the traffic in stride come Monday or Tuesday, checking in with YouTube may be a good bet.
The big 3 press conferences are scheduled as follows:
- Microsoft Media Briefing - Monday, June 14th @ 10:30am PST
- Nintendo Media Briefing - Tuesday, June 15th @ 9:00am PST
- Sony Media Briefing - Tuesday, June 15 @ 12:00pm PST