YouTube to live stream Presidential and Vice Presidential debates, also adds 22 AOL-curated channels

YouTube is continuing its dominance in the online video space today by announcing plans to live stream the 2012 Presidential and Vice Presidential debates and launch AOL’s entire original video content library through 22 curated channels.

Woah. Google launched the YouTube Elections Hub in August as a complete video resource for all-things political until the U.S. Election Day on Nov. 6. The Hub features videos from politicians, parties, and well-known media, as well as shared coverage with live and on-demand content from ABC News, Al Jazeera English, BuzzFeed, Larry King, The New York Times, Phil DeFranco, Univision, and the Wall Street Journal.

Now, according to the official YouTube blog, Google announced the Hub would broadcast the four general election debates starting Oct. 3 at 9 p.m. EST:

Throughout the month of October, President Barack Obama and Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney will go head-to-head in a series of highly-anticipated general election debates. This year, for the first time, you can watch the debates live and in full on the YouTube Elections Hub, via our partners at ABC News, who will be live streaming all four debates on the ABC News YouTube channel. No matter where you are in the world or how you’ll be accessing the internet, you’ll be able to watch the most important events of the 2012 election on YouTube.

YouTube will also post highlight clips at YouTube.com/politics after the debate for the busy folks unable to tune-in live.

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AOL, which owns many popular brands like The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, and Moviefone, also announced a deal with YouTube today to add nearly 20,000 videos to Google’s video-sharing platform. AOL operates its own video platform, dubbed “The AOL On Network,” that launched in April 2012 and surpassed 60 million unique visitors in August, but now its massive content library will distribute to 22 curated and monetized channels on YouTube.

The official AOL blog elaborated:

According to comScore’s Video Metrix for August 2012, AOL and YouTube’s parent company, Google, are the two largest video content properties by number of video streams per month, which means this deal brings together the two largest video properties on the web.

YouTube unveiled its new channel strategy in October of last year in an effort to bring more premium content into the mix, which means we’ll be joining some of the biggest names in media including Hearst, Lionsgate, Reuters, Slate and Pitchfork.

YouTube’s premium content initiative currently garners over a million views per week, as AOL noted, so the expansion is a very lucrative choice for AOL despite the brewing competition between their platforms.