The San Francisco Giants won the World Series earlier this evening and of course the celebration in San Francisco has at this point devolved into multiple riots, which you can now follow on Twitter through the hashtags #SFRiot and #SFScanner. About a hundred or so people have checked into the riot on Foursquare at the venue “Giants Riot on Polk Street” and assorted others. → Read More
We’ve gotten word this morning that online streaming video service Ustream has laid off 9 people from its 200 person staff. With social news site Digg having other notable layoffs this week, it’s crucial to remember that startups often shed staff when going through product and business goal realignments. This is also the case here according to Ustream VP of Communications Lynn Fox. → Read More
Today live video streaming service Ustream launches a series of new features with the intent of making it easier for users to monetize their platform.
The sexiest new feature is a service called Open Pay Per View which allows any Ustream broadcaster to apply for their own pay per view program, charging users to view premium content through Pay Pal.
Like on Stickcam, with Ustream Open Pay Per View any Ustream user can apply directly to Ustream to create their own Pay Per View Service, allowing users like Robert Scoble or TechCrunch to earn some cash whenever they have a high profile guest, livestream an important conference or hold any other event where they might draw more eyeballs. → Read More
Have you ever wanted your camera to stream live video to the web (on Ustream) without having to carry a computer around? Then the so-called Cerevo Livebox [JP], made by Japanese startup Cerevo, might do the trick for you. → Read More
By now you’ve doubtless heard about the ongoing rescue of 33 Chilean miners, who have been tragically trapped 2,000 feet underground since August 5. After months of waiting, the miners are being rescued one by one (as of this writing three are still below ground), and media organizations are broadcasting the footage of the recue effort live to a reported 1 billion people. That massive worldwide audience has led to some new records for live-streaming service Ustream, which has been broadcasting feeds from media organizations around the world.
Ustream says that it has served 5.3 million streams over the course of the rescue, tallying figures between 4AM October 11 until 4AM this morning (given the fact that the rescue is still going on, the final count will be significantly higher). → Read More
One thing I’m particularly proud of: we have provided a free live stream of nearly every conference we’ve ever put on. We’ve found that we still have plenty of people that want to attend in person. But for those who can’t make the event, the content is available to watch, gratis. Very few other large events do this.
The numbers from TechCrunch Disrupt: San Francisco earlier this week are staggering. We’re still gathering the on demand view data from TechCrunchTV. But we’ve just received the high level numbers from Ustream, who powered the live stream of the event.
235,389 unique viewers tuned in at some point during the event (there were about 2,000 people there in person). Over 65,000 hours of video were viewed, and a total of 316,426 streams were served. → Read More
comScore has just released some telling stats about the massive growth of live streaming video over the web. According to the analytics company, over the past year, the amount of time American audiences spent watching video on the major live video publishers (Justin.tv, Ustream, Livestream, LiveVideo, and Stickam) has grown 648% to more than 1.4 billion minutes. Of course, video consumption on the web has grown generally—U.S. audiences watching YouTube and Hulu increased 68% and 75%, respectively, over the same time period. comScore says that even though live stream viewership still represents a fraction of the total time spent watching online video, it does indicate that viewers are increasingly looking for live streams on the web.
While live online video sites don’t have nearly as much of an audience as static video sites, the live video sites have been able to keep their audiences more engaged for a longer period of time. For example, the average live streamed video view is 7% longer than the average online video view. → Read More
When you think about broadcasting live video over the Internet, being tethered to your computer isn’t so much fun. Broadcasting live from your mobile phone, now that starts to get interesting. Today, Justin.tv is joining the mobile party with an Android app for broadcasting live video (which will be available later today). A similar iPhone app is also in the works (it’s current iPhone app is view-only).
While Justin.tv may be a little late to the party, it comes bearing some new gifts. The Android app takes advantage of hardware video encoding, which drains the battery less. It also adjusts the bitrate at which the video is uploaded, depending on the strength of your wireless connection. → Read More
Back in June, I sat down with Ustream CEO John Ham, who talked about the site’s rapid growth and its plans to expand. At the time, Ham told me that one of Ustream’s key strategies was to foster its relationship with the entertainment industry. Today, the company is taking a big step in that direction: Ustream is opening a new Hollywood office, and it has hired Jason Kirk, formerly MySpace’s VP of Video & Entertainment, to oversee its partnership efforts.
The other new hires include Wayne Sieve, Ustream’s new VP of Sports, who was formerly head of business development at Yahoo Sports. They’ve also hired Jeff Varnell as executive director of business development (he was formerly an executive director of business development at MySpace). → Read More
A few days ago we learned that the UFC had subpoenaed Ustream.tv and Justin.tv for the information of people who had ilegally streamed pay-per-view events. Having spoken to these people in the past, I knew they weren’t sitting around in their offices, rubbing their hands together as intellectual property was being violated all over the place. No, these are legitimate businesses looking to cooperate with companies like UFC whenever necessary. → Read More
If this were the AP, the following would be the lede to this next story: “UFC President Dana White wants to put pirates in a kimura.” (That, of course, assumed the AP funny lede guy even knows what a kimura is!) Man, those soft ledes are terrible. Moving on… yeah, Dana White is upset at pirates. The promotion has subpoenaed Justin.tv and Ustream.tv, demanding to know the names of people who stream UFC pay-per-view events. → Read More
Looking around the web, it’s clear that live video streaming is on the rise. News sites are frequently embedding breaking content, artists are live-streaming their concerts as a promotion vehicle, and celebrities are increasingly broadcasting the mundane events of their daily lives (apparently lots of people like watching that sort of thing too). But there are still plenty of question marks — what exactly do people want to watch streamed live? How are they going to watch it? And how does YouTube play into all of this? Last week I sat down with Ustream CEO John Ham who shared some of his thoughts on the future of live streaming and how his company would fare over the next few years.
Our conversation was spurred by recent rumors that YouTube may be preparing to launch a live streaming service of some kind. → Read More
Popular live video platform Ustream is adding a new product to its repertoire today: an iPhone application platform called Ustream Live Mobilizer that offers brands, celebrities, and bands a customizable iPhone application that features Ustream’s live steaming capabilities.
Each Mobilizer app is branded to the artist’s specifications (in other words, they don’t look like generic cookie cutter apps). The biggest feature here is support for watching an artist’s live video feed through Ustream, but the app also includes support for sharing to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. It also has Ustream’s ‘Social Stream’ feature, which lets you submit questions to the artist during a live stream and syndicate it out to other social networks. → Read More
Just four months after a major investment from Japan’s SoftBank, Ustream has officially launched its Asian arm. The live broadcasting site unveiled Ustream Asia this Monday, a joint venture with TV Bank Corporation (a unit of SoftBank). Ustream is also rolling out two new Japanese apps for the iPhone, a viewer and a broadcaster, specifically made for the market. The roots of Ustream Asia will be based in Japan but the company plans to expand to the greater Asia Pacific region. → Read More
Watching live video on your iPhone is nothing new, but it is becoming increasingly easier to do. More than a year after Ustream launched its live video viewing iPhone app, and followed up with a video publishing app, along with Qik and Kyte, Justin.tv is entering the mobile game with its first iPhone app (which should be available shortly in the iTunes store).
Justin.tv CEO Michael Seibel says they took their time with the app because they wanted to get it right. “We tried not to cut corners,” he says. All the live videos and channels available on the Website can be watched in the iPhone app. You can find videos by looking at the featured channels or by searching. Videos play horizontally in landscape mode, and text chat is built into the app. The chat text is laid across the bottom of the video and can be tapped on to make it disappear. And the audio works both with or without headphones, which apparently isn’t the case with all other iPhone video apps. → Read More
Before livestreaming video networks like Justin.TV can become attractive to advertisers, they need to deal with their piracy issues. It’s the same thing YouTube had to go through, except with live video streams. Like YouTube, Justin.tv complies with DMCA takedown notices and is developing digital fingerprinting technology to identify copyrighted video on its network automatically. It also invites copyright owners to police the site directly.
Despite these measures, a casual perusal of the most popular streams on Justin.tv is filled with pirated streams of professional sports, TV shows, and movies. Right now, for instance, you can watch King of Queens or CNN International, taken straight from TV. The company finds itself increasingly under fire for copyright issues. To help it deal with these issues, Justin.tv now has a new adviser, Eric Goldman, the director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clare University and a highly-respected Internet law blogger. Unlike Justin.TV’s very-expensive lawyers at Wilson Sonsini, Goldman will be less constrained in speaking publicly on behalf of the company about these issues. Goldman is an expert on how copyright law is applied to user-generated content. But in many ways live video on the Web is a new beast. → Read More
Late last year, Ustream and qik launched iPhone applications that let you stream videos from the iPhone to the web and allow others to watch them as they’re being recorded. And now there is an iPhone app called TwitCasting Live (iTunes link), which offers the same basic functionality, but is – as the name suggests – much deeper integrated into Twitter.
The free app is essentially a live streaming app and Twitter client rolled into one. TwitCasting Live splits the iPhone screen in half, allowing you to view your Twitter timeline, update your status, access the web etc. on the bottom half, while recording (broadcasting) video on the top. → Read More
Check out the jobs on CrunchBoard. Jobs from New York to San Francisco to Germany. See jobs in Europe here.
In the last couple of weeks we have added more than 50 jobs on CrunchBoard, including a Ruby Developer and student intern here at TechCrunch.
Click through to see a quick sample of some jobs posted. → Read More
Streaming video site Ustream has just pulled in a massive new round of funding: $75 million. This second round was led by SoftBank, a Japanese telecom giant. Previously, the site had raised just below $13 million in funding, which came from its Series A in 2008 and its angel round in late 2007.
Update: While Ustream noted the $75 million number, SoftBank has clarified that they’re investing $20 million now for a 13.7% stake in the company with an option to invest up to $55 million more by 2011 — which would make them Ustream’s largest shareholder with over 30% of the outstanding shares.
Perhaps even crazier is that the service is saying that additional funding commitments are pending from other investors in the U.S. and Asia, so the round could actually be larger than the $75 million when all is said and done. We’re hearing reports that there was quite a bit of competition to be involved in the round, and apparently all the dust hasn’t settled yet. → Read More
Looking to turn your PC into a live video production studio? Ustream has just launched a new desktop application to help make that happen. Today, the company is launching a new desktop client called Ustream Producer that boasts high video quality and editing tools that can help give your streams an added layer of polish. The application is available for both Mac and PC, and you can grab it here.
Now, you’ve always been able to broadcast to Ustream via your web browser, which uses Flash to access you PC’s webcam. But Ustream says that the desktop client offers both increased video quality (you can stream in HD and H.264), and perhaps more importantly, it allows you to create broadcasts that can be far more complex than just a single stream from your webcam. The application includes support for Picture In Picture, which means you simultaneously show two streams at the same time. → Read More
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