Meet NomadCast, a recent addition to the live-streaming app space. While Meerkat, Periscope and YouNow have been focused on the social aspect of live streaming, NomadCast varies in many ways. NomadCast isn’t a social app, it’s an iOS live-streaming app first and foremost.
The French company actually started working on its live streaming last year, so NomadCast isn’t a reaction to the hype behind Periscope and Meerkat, but a brand new take on live streaming. Here’s how it works.
When you launch the app, you land directly in the live stream creation screen. You select if you want to share your live stream on Twitter and/or Facebook, enter a title and hit record. And that’s it. NomadCast doesn’t present you with streams to watch. You can’t follow people or check past streams. Again, NomadCast is all about live streaming.
Once you start streaming, the app sends a tweet or a Facebook post to your friends or your page with an embedded player. Your friends and followers will then be able to stream your video directly from Twitter or Facebook without ever having to leave the site. This is a much more seamless experience compared to its competitors as it feels more like hitting play on a YouTube video than loading a separate website to see a live stream.
Behind the scene, NomadCast can stream at up to 720p, with an adaptive bitrate on slower network. The app tells you that you should switch to landscape, differentiating itself from its portrait-only competitors. During my small test on a weak Wi-Fi network with around 150 kB/s of upload, the end video looked much better than anything on Periscope or Meerkat. And the stream delay is much shorter than on Meerkat.
This isn’t a coincidence as some of the team members behind NomadCast worked on Dailymotion’s live-streaming technology. In other words, this isn’t the team’s first take on live streaming.
When it comes to real-time interactions, as NomadCast doesn’t redirect you to use its website or app, it pulls Facebook comments and tweet replies instead. The broadcaster can then see them in real time and react to them. It won’t be as interactive as native comments on YouNow.
Finally, there is one last interesting use case for NomadCast. You can embed a NomadCast stream anywhere, making it a more direct competitor to more traditional live-streaming companies, such as Livestream and Ustream. As you only need to install an app on your phone, media organizations could start using NomadCast if they don’t have a full-fledged camera crew on the ground.
Instead of deleting live streams 24 hours after they are done, NomadCast automatically archives them so that you can watch them and share them again weeks or months after the original streaming date.
It’s still the very beginning for the company, but in less than two months, users have shot 136 hours of live stream, representing 5,016 hours of watched content. Let’s see if NomadCast can get enough traction to become an essential tool for people and organizations with a large Twitter and Facebook audience. It’s another angle on this market as the company focuses on features, quality and distribution instead of virality, engagement and ephemerality.
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