It seems that video service YouTube could well be gearing up to offer users more options when it comes to live streams of video content, something in which the service has until now dabbled in but not committed too heavily to.

A live streaming YouTube could put a lot of people out of business...

YouTube’s live streams have tended to be restricted to specific events, with the most notable being the streams set up for the US debates on healthcare, an Alecia Keys concert and the U2 gig that some particularly faithful Irish fans stayed up until ungodly hours for, thankful for the bank holiday. Now though, it seems that YouTube could well be gearing up to offer a fair bit more in the line of live content, with TechCrunch reporting that recent screenshots from YouTube seeem to indicate the addition of an option to stream content live.

The screenshot in question comes from Google’s own help page for Google Moderator. For those who’ve missed it, Google Moderator is the system that allows for real-time questions and responses to YouTube videos, something that had seemed just a touch superfluous without the addition of live streaming options, but with them makes an awful lot more sense. The YouTube screenshot shows live streaming as an option on content creation pages, though it could all just be some kind of mad anomaly.

If nothing else, it’d be a very interesting move for YouTube to push into live streaming. Just how well it’d work is something that’s hard not to wonder. While other live streaming services certainly make video streaming work very well indeed, those tend to be a fair bit smaller than YouTube. Offering live streaming to YouTube users would open things up for some tremendously heavy, and very volatile, traffic.

Of course, YouTube is already a difficult beast to moderate, and content that’s against the terms of service does already manage to sneak through. We’d imagine the real question for us is how to keep YouTube from becoming a kind of a broadcast version of Chatroulette,..