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
This guest post was written by Erik Fikkert, Lead Reviewer, AppVee. Also check out Appvee’s previous picks of the best apps in the App store
The iPhone and iPod touch have become immediately recognizable names around the world. Apple recently announced that the iPhone is the most popular mobile phone in the US. In addition, the iPod touch is generally regarded as the media player of choice, offering much more than just music. Perhaps the key to their success is the ever-growing app store which currently boasts over 100,000 apps. For those of you not crazy about math, that’s a huge number—you would have to purchase and download over 11 apps an hour, every single day for a year to test them all. While it is safe to say the majority of apps available are less than appealing, there are a few gems that stand out from the rest. We took a look and compiled a list of the best apps 2009 had to offer. → Read More
The live video streaming application Qik has just been approved in the App Store and should be available shortly, we’ve learned. The company submitted the app a couple weeks ago following the approval of Ustream’s live streaming application, and as expected, Apple also had no problem with it now. This marks a change from Apple, which previously was blocking all apps that did live video (recording) streaming.
Apparently, the way these streaming apps work is using a restricted API (a screen capture API) to get around the fact that Apple doesn’t grant them access to the video APIs for live capture and streaming. But Apple has suggested that it will no longer enforce protecting this API and in the future should open more that allow for live video streaming. → Read More
Bambuser, a mobile streaming startup in the same space as Qik and Ustream, has announced that their live streaming iPhone application has been approved by Apple. The news comes only a few days after Ustream’s live video streaming app was approved, ending a 18 month long drought of broadcasting apps on the App Store. The Bambuser application lets anyone use their iPhone to broadcast live video directly to the web. You can get it on the App Store here. [iTunes link]
The release of these apps is a big deal — for a year and a half since the App Store’s launch, Apple consistently rejected any application that allowed users to broadcast video from their iPhones. The exact reason for this ban is uncertain, but has been attributed to (very valid) concerns over AT&T’s ability to handle their heavy bandwidth consumption. → Read More
As we first reported last night, Apple is finally allowing live streaming video applications into the App Store. Apple’s acceptance of the Ustream Live Broadcaster has seemingly paved the way for other live-streaming apps. And one of the best known ones, Qik, is wasting little time to get its app out there. The company writes in a blog post today that they’ve already submitted their app for approval.
I’ve actually had the Qik live-streaming app on my iPhone for a while, thanks to the magic of ad-hoc distribution. Unfortunately, Apple’s policies restrict the number of copies Qik can send this way, so the application remained mostly a proof-of-concept for most people. Given how quickly Qik submitted the app to the store, we expect the official build that will likely get approved to be the same one we have been using, which we reviewed here. It’s solid, but the video quality leaves a little to be desired compared to some competing video apps (none of which did live streaming). → Read More
Services like Ustream and Qik have long offered the promise of live streaming video from your mobile phone to the web — except if you had an iPhone. For those devices, that was only possible if you jailbroke your phone. Not anymore.
The Ustream Live Broadcaster has just gone live in the App Store tonight and yes, it allows you to stream live video from the iPhone to the web. And yes, it even works over a 3G connection. And yes, it’s awesome. → Read More
This is an overview of what was said during the panel conversation at Le Web on Platforms, which was moderated by our own Mike Arrington. (right)
Lots of panelists for this particular discussion – the conference organizers managed to get all of these people on one stage: Ethan Beard (Director, Facebook Developer Network), Cristian Cussen (Director of Business Development at Ning), Brandon Duncan (Director of Platform Engineering at LinkedIn), John Ham (Co-founder & CEO of Ustream), David Jacobs, (VP , Six Apart), Mike Jones (COO, MySpace) and Ryan Sarver (Director of Platform, Twitter). → Read More
