“You can now monetize your live events with advertising or paid options. A live event can be claimed in the new video manager like any other video and monetized with instream ads or paid options where you can set price by country.”

YouTube has been experimenting with pay-per-view for select publishers, including UFC. Making the option more widely available could make YouTube’s live streaming more attractive to other sports and entertainment publishers.

Charging for streams is for now limited to users in Canada, Japan, France, the United States and the U.K. Of course, YouTube isn’t the only one to offer paid live streaming: Ustream and others have been offering publishers a way to charge for events for some time.

YouTube announced pay-per-view as part of a set of new features rolled out for the one-year anniversary of its live streaming platform. YouTube Live, as it is officially called, is still only available to select publishers, but there are plans to eventually make it more widely available. Form Tuesday’s blog post:

“If you’re one of the many people who’ve asked for YouTube Live but don’t have access yet, we want to thank you very much for your patience. We’ve developed these features with the expectation many more of you will eventually use YouTube Live, and like we said last year, this process takes time to roll out broadly.”

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The Swedish live streaming startup wants to use the challenge to become a little better known in the U.S., but Eriksson told me last week that it’s also an experiment in interactive live streaming. “It’s about challenging people to participate and to contribute,” he said. Eriksson tried the same thing in London earlier this year, and he was surprised by the spot-on suggestions from countless strangers. “The Internet and social media bring a lot of good out of people,” he told me.

The biggest challenge for the New York experiment could be mobile broadband connectivity. Eriksson complained about the poor quality of 3G network connections when I met him in San Francisco a few days ago, and his experiences in New York haven’t been much better, judging by a recent post on the Bambuser challenge Tumblr:

“How do New Yorkers get things done? The network here is really really bad. After a lot of hassle and calls, we finally got our equipment working. And even though we’re broadcasting on a 4G network, the speeds are a LOT slower than 3G in Europe. It’s a great city – really buzzing with excitement – but it’s lumbered with a third world network.”

Bambuser was founded in 2007 in Sweden, and has since established itself as a live streaming startup with a strong focus on mobile video. The company recently launched new versions of its iOS and Android apps that support a so-called complement data approach: Users can live stream at a lower quality first, and then simply upload any missing frames for a high-quality archive version.

Check out this video interview I did with Eriksson and Bambuser CEO Jonas Vig early last year:

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But if you don’t have cable or can’t watch TV at work, don’t worry; the entire event is also available online. NBC is selling a Tour de France all access pass for $29.95, which will get you live HD video of every stage of the race all the way through the final leg, when cyclists reach Paris on July 24.

The network is also promising paying subscribers access to highlight video clips, interviews and other exclusive online content. All access subscribers can even personalize the race by tracking their favorite riders both via live GPS on Google Maps, as well as through a stats dashboard. All of this will also be available through dedicated iPhone, iPad and Android apps, which will be available in time for the race, according to NBC.

Speaking of timing: Versus will begin airing some of the pre-race activities starting this Thursday, but All Access subscribers will get their first live video feed Saturday July 2 at 7 a.m. EDT.

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“I said: Okay, let’s do it,” recalled Kentzell when I met her and Laporte in the TwiT cottage in Petaluma, Calif. last week. Kentzell is now the CEO of TWiT, and the company is ready to take the next big step towards its ambitious goal in July with the move into a spacious new studio built with a 24/7 live video operation in mind.

Check out this video of Leo Laporte and Lisa Kentzell showing off their new studio:

The new space is only a couple blocks away from the old studio, but in a way, the two studios are worlds apart. The old TWiT cottage, which has been Laporte’s home base since 2005, looks like your grandma’s small old summer-house taken over by a bunch of geeks. Too many geeks, actually. The 18 staffers are literally bumping into each other all the time. The new studio, on the other hand, will have multiple sets, 40 cameras, state of the art tech and lots of room for future expansion.

The move is also as sign of TWiT doubling down on live video. It’s a ambitious proposition, in part because most of its audience still thinks of TWiT as a podcast network. Kentzell told me TWiT sees about 5 million downloads every month. Live is harder to track, she said, but still much smaller.

“The live audience isn’t here yet,” admitted Laporte. “It’s a big bet on the future.” And live is expensive: TWiT recently had to shut down the live feed of its Roku channel because of exploding bandwidth costs. However, Laporte believes that these things will eventually sort themselves out with bandwidth prices going down.

Taking a step back when things get too expensive is also a part of the TWiT way of doing business. Laporte and Kentzell thought about moving to San Francisco with the new studio, but decided to stay in Petaluma to get more bang for their buck. The company only spends as much as it can afford at any given time, and has been entirely bootstrapped from day one, declining many opportunities for outside funding. “We are very committed to bootstrapping,” said Laporte. Kentzell agreed: “We wanted to have full creative and financial control.”

Speaking of Kentzell, she’s one of the lesser-known folks on the TWiT team, but Laporte couldn’t speak more highly of her. “It really wasn’t a business until Lisa came along,” he told me. Laporte initially hired her to do his books; he soon discovered that she was outsourcing the actual bookkeeping to a whole team she managed. Impressed, he convinced her to bring some of that leadership to TWiT. Laporte credits her for doubling revenue every year in the past few years, up to the tune of $3 million in 2010.

Much of that money comes from advertising these days, which is brought in by an external sales team. Initially, TWiT was entirely donation-based, with listeners shipping in as much as $20,000 per month. The company is relying on some of that loyalty to finish its new studio, which will cost about $850,000, by selling commemorative bricks to fans. “Donations give people a feeling to be part of it,” said Laporte.

So what’s next for TWiT? 24/7 live streaming is one goal; a satellite bureau in New York is also in the cards. Laporte also wants to hire more talent and add more shows after poaching broadcaster Tom Merritt and producer Jason Howell from Cnet last year. But he doesn’t believe in branching out too far. “I’m not trying to get bigger; I’m trying to serve our niche better,” he said, adding that he’s confident to have a good sense of the content that will be popular. “I really understand our audience. I am one of them.”

And as for the ambitions to become the CNN of tech, Laporte says it’s not just a numbers game. He may never reach as many simultaneous viewers as the cable channels, but he believes TWiT can be just as relevant. His team will have succeeded once “a breaking news story happens and people turn to us,” he explained. Getting there may take years, and millions of dollars that Laporte and Kentzell intend to make the old-fashioned way: through bootstrapping. Said Kentzell, “It’s a little risky, but I think it’s worthwhile.”

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“This new platform integrates live streaming directly into YouTube channels; all broadcasters need is a webcam or external USB/FireWire camera. Included in the test is a “Live Comments” module which lets you engage with the broadcaster and the broader YouTube community. For the purpose of the trial, this offering will only be available today and tomorrow. Based on the results of this initial test, we’ll evaluate rolling out the platform more broadly to our partners worldwide.”

YouTube has long been rumored to be launching live streaming. The site’s co-founder, Steve Chen, said more than two years ago that a live video launch was imminent, and TechCrunch recently unearthed a screenshot that hinted at live streaming.

YouTube may have held back on releasing a live streaming option due to copyright concerns. Live video sites like Ustream and Justin.tv have faced criticism  in the past for enabling copyright infringement. Both sites now use video filtering, but some argue these measures don’t go far enough. YouTube’s announcement hints at the possibility that it could sidestep this issue by restricting its live offering only to approved partners.

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The Facebook Live channel kicks off today with a live event at 6:00 p.m. EDT/3:00 p.m. PDT featuring actress and filmmaker America Ferrera, whose most recent film, The Dry Land, was marketed entirely through social media, mostly through Facebook. Ferrera isn’t the only celebrity that Facebook users can expect to see; others might appear on the channel as they visit Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters, like when Kanye West showed up to the offices last week.

But for the most part, Facebook Live will be used to showcase Facebook products and how people are using those products, Facebook Marketing Manager Randi Zuckerberg said in a phone interview. In addition to product news, she said the channel would also allow users to interact with Facebook engineers and other employees to get a better sense of what’s happening within the company. According to Zuckerberg, the Facebook Live channel will probably have one or two chats a week at first, but it could adjust do more or less in the future, based on user feedback.

The Facebook Live app is embeddable and can be added as a tab to any Facebook page. It allows viewers to update their status, chat with each other or ask a question, which is then submitted to the moderator. Videos from past live events will also be archived, so users can refer back to them after they are over.

Facebook has used its social features to augment a number of live events in the past, including last year’s Presidential Inauguration and Michael Jackson’s Memorial Service. More recently, Facebook used live streaming, including its social chat and sharing capabilities during its F8 developers conference. Many of the features that were built out for F8, including support for chat in multiple languages, will be included in the Facebook Live app.

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It appears all the live video streams came from the same feed, but there were some differences in encoding quality and lag between them. YouTube’s live stream at CitizenTube had the clearest and highest-quality video in my experience, transmitting at 720p. But YouTube’s video seemed a half-second behind the other live streaming players from Hulu, Ustream, and Livestream. YouTube did have a fast startup when launched, however, compared to some of the other streams. The AP Live feed from Livestream seemed to have the slowest startup time, but once the video started it was in line with Hulu and others.

Interestingly, CNN’s video seemed to significantly lag the other provider’s live streams. This could be due in part to Turner Broadcasting using peer-to-peer technology from Octoshape for its live streams. While the plugin could lower costs for the news organization while providing a higher-quality stream, the P2P aspect might have introduced a few seconds of lag time between CNN’s stream and other live video providers.

While Ustream’s social commenting feature is one of the main draws for some people, it appears that the comments were turned off for the CBS News feed. Considering the comments that were coming in before the video started (“THIS IS SPARTA,” for instance), it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that audience participation was suppressed during the broadcast.

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Conviva is announcing today it has raised $20 million in second round funding. The investment came from UV Partners, New Enterprise Associates, and Foundation Capital, and brings Conviva’s total funding to $29 million since being founded in November 2006.

In an interview last week, Conviva CEO and President Carlos Ramón would not disclose much about the platform he is building, but said the company already has customers signed. He was happy to talk about the market need, however:

“The first generation of video delivery just doesn’t work,” he said. “It’s like playing Russian roulette. That’s just not the way you run a business, and that’s not the way you monetize content.”

Ramón said the company’s platform would enable content owners to create a “virtual living room” — whatever that means! Conviva has a demo on its site of a car race that users can watch from multiple camera angles simultaneously and chat about in-window.

Conviva has an engineering- and PhD-heavy team of 55 focused on building out its live platform, and along with the investment is touting its board of directors, which includes Ramón, formerly of Akamai; Hui Zhang, its chief scientist and co-founder and a professor at Carnegie Mellon; Ion Stoica, its CTO and co-founder and a professor at UC Berkeley; Mike Ramsay, of NEA and formerly TiVo; Forest Baskett, of NEA and formerly Silicon Graphics; Peter Sonsini, of NEA and formerly VMware; and Adam Grosser of Foundation Capital and formerly Excite@Home.

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