YouTube co-founder Steve Chen says the site plans to launch a live video service this year.

In a brief interview videotaped at a New York party thrown by YouTube, Chen told Sarah Meyers of Pop17.com that YouTube had always wanted to offer live video but lacked the resources. That, however, has changed, since Google's acquisition of YouTube in 2006.

The video and transcript of the interview were posted by TechCrunch. In the interview, Meyers asks, "When are you guys gonna do live video on YouTube?"

Chen responds: "2008. We'll do it this year." He goes on to say, "Live video is just something that we've always wanted to do. We've never had the resources to do it correctly, but now with Google, we hope to actually launch something this year."

Live video, which is the ability to use a Web cam to record events and then stream the results in real time to the Web is not new to the Internet. Yahoo launched such a service as an "experimental release" this month.

Along with showing Web cam-generated video streams from people's computers, Yahoo Live also offers developers an application programming interface for mashing up live video streams on a Web site or client application. The API uses REST, or Representational State Transfer, an XML-based protocol for invoking Web services over HTTP.

A unique feature in the service is the ability to see people watching the same video, assuming their Web cams are linked to the service. In addition, there's live chat while the video is playing.

Other sites offering live video include Justin.TV, Ustream.TV and Mogulus.