What does General Wesley Clark know about live Web video? Apparently enough to land him a seat on Ustream.TV’s board of advisors. Or maybe they just liked his shiny medals. The company also announced a funding round today from Band of Angels and Western Technology Investors, which specializes in debt financing for startups. The amount was not disclosed.
Ustream.TV is a site for live Web video broadcasting that launched last March. It claims 115,000 people have used the service, “broadcasting one million unique viewer hours per month,” whatever that means. (How do you broadcast a “unique viewer hour”?) Anyway, that comes to about 5,000 hours of video a day, attracting a few hundred thousand viewers. Most of the broadcasters are regular consumers, but the site has also been used by presidential candidates, and the Plain White Ts rock band to broadcast a live concert that was watched by 150,000 fans online.
However much money it raised, Ustream will need it to compete in an already crowded field that includes Justin.TV, Stickam, Blog.tv, and Mogulus.