Live video streaming service Ustream is rolling out a white-label service today called Watershed for Websites and businesses that want to broadcast their own live streams. Watershed comes with a lot of extra management capabilities like the ability to customize the player, add a logo, turn on features like chat, polling, picture-in-picture video chat, Twitter integration, analytics and more.
Ustream is targeting this service at companies that may want to live stream meetings to employees, as well as to Websites that want to offer their own live-streaming programming and need more than what they can get by simply embedding a Ustream.tv player today.
Watershed is a cloud computing service, with pricing on a pay-as-you-go basis. Pricing starts at $1 per viewer hour for 1,000 viewer hours per month or less and scales down to $0.25 per viewer hour for streams that a reach 50,000 viewer hours per month or more. (A viewer hour is one viewer watching a stream for one hour, or 60 viewers watching for one minute, etc.).
So a live stream watched by only 30 people for a half hour would cost $15, but a stream watched by 30,000 people for a half hour would cost $7,500. I am not sure how much a comparable content delivery network like Akamai would charge, but Ustream CEO John Ham says they are aiming for a comparable price. Watershed’s advantage being that customers only need to pay for what they actually use.
That still seems pretty steep to me. If live video streaming is going to ever gain a mass audience, the price is going to have to come down.
Update: Mogulus CEO Max Haot counters that his competing Mogulus Pro service is actually cheaper for anyone delivering more than 500 viewer hours per month. Using my example above of 30,000 viewers watching for 30 minutes, he says that would cost $3,490 with his top-of-the-line plan. Here is a Scribd document he provides with handy price comparison tables.
Update 2: Ustream CEO John Ham counters Hoat with the following:
Max miscalculated/misinformed you about Watershed’s pricing structure. He states the pricing is cumulative when it is tierred. Specifically, he highlights in yellow in his spreadsheet that at 100,000 viewer hours Ustream is at $39,000 when the truth is 100,000 viewer hours * $0.25 so $25,000. It’s also not an apples-to-apples comparison with price because Watershed includes higher quality and Max charges you for higher quality/bitrate.
Also, it’s important to note that we’ve learned that people want to have bitrate/quality flexibilty. They want to broadcast sometimes at 300 kbps and sometimes for important events like Fortune 50 earnings calls at 1 Mbps. Watershed allows broadcasters to choose-their-own-quality or bitrate up 2 Mbps. We absorb that and offset it with our economies of scale and pass that benefit onto the customer. Max charges based upon data transfer of $/GB and penalizes users for higher quality. In fact, at higher quality streaming for volume users (CDN users) Watershed is more economical than Mogulus! At 750 kbps and 50,000 viewer hours, Watershed is more economical. In fact, because he charges $0.80/GB at higher bitrates his cost balloons.
wow. pay-as-you-go is revolutionary.
Like the Amazon Cloud but for streaming – great idea.
Not really. Nobody has mentioned http://www.make.tv – it has more features than ustream or Mogulus and their pricing model is much more reasonable.
http://www.make.tv
So I can have my own show with my own branding? Pretty sweet.
I cant see a market for this service, love to be proved wrong though.
They should have called it “WaterCloset”
The math is wrong, since it’s between 5,000 people and 50,000, for 30,000 people watching a 30 minute video you would pay $7,500.
This if I understood the pricing scales.
yes, thanks. My math was wrong, fixed it in the post.
About time the live streaming guys actually have a business model
NICE!
Been waiting for something like this! What about RTSP streaming?
That is insanely expensive for a substandard live streaming service.
I’ve used them all and Ustream is by far the best live video streaming service available.
Mogulus PRO already does this at a fraction of the price, with much better quality (we’ve tested). We’re staying with them, and guessing the other big media sites will too.
Pay-as-you-go is a gimmick.
Actually, I tried Mogulus Pro and it was HORRIBLE. Very buggy and wasted $300.
I would not recommend it to any other professional videographers.
I will test Watershed to understand how they perform.
I ran the numbers.
Watershed includes HQ, multi-bitrate at a better price.
Mogulis charges you for additional GB usage which means more cost for better quality.
Do your math.
The pricing structure is absolutely ridiculous. uStream’s $1 per viewing hour may be an option for smaller businesses with short instructional streams. Larger corporations that stream content will have longer webinars and a greater number of viewers, and will have the capability of streaming from their own servers at a much lower cost.
A competitor will find a better way to charge customers and uStream will follow suit. Stickam’s video quality is inferior to uStream, but they will do very will if the max viewers limitation is removed. https://payperlive.com/plans
Has Ustream figured out their business model yet?
Is it puppy-cams/capture the precious moments of your life for free or outrageously-priced/let’s go after the enterprise or is it let’s knock Qik out/live streaming on your mobile phone?
Would be interesting to know if the founders can actually articulate a complete vision and strategy for their business.
@Video Journo: please stop misinform the readers. Ustream’s worst price is as much as Mogulus Pro’s price. Please compare the features too, Watershed offers much much more feature without Mogulus’s limitations. Better quality is just a lie too, it depends mostly on the bandwidth of the broadcaster and the code used. In this area Watershed allows for its user using FME with which one can broadcast with H264. And don’t forget that Ustream has mobile broadcaster possibility which I guess will show up in Watershed very soon.
I’ve tried both and Mogulus has much more features such as VOD galleries, storyboards, auto pilot, custom widgets etc Also I put watershed to full quality and was awful! I think the ONLY thing Watershed has more features is in security/privacy. Mogulus has almost none.
The pricing model does not work at all for SMB market. The surveys all point to a much lower falt rate being needed.
The pricing model is fine, I’d just want more details on how granular the tracking is – are they going to do a partial=full minute like the phone companies, or will we get second-based billing (which would rock)?
The statistics are in the seconds granularity. You truly pay as much as you use down to a second.
I’ve been doing high quality live internet broadcasting for several years now with several different free services (Ustream, Justin, Mogulus, Srickam, etc.) and several CDNs directly. Haven’t yet tested Watershed specifically, but based on what I’ve seen and know already, this seems like a very promising service.
Let me clear up some misconceptions first:
Quality: Quality is almost entirely dependent on the local broadcaster’s set-up, and most importantly, encoding. All the major services (Ustream, Stickam, Mogulus, Justin), allow integration with Flash Media Encoder, which makes the quality argument almost moot. These providers deliver what hits their servers, so if you’re NOT getting good quality, look first at your setup before pointing fingers at these services.
The most you can ask for from these services is stability. Amongst the free services, I always recommend Ustream for their stability. When it comes to direct CDNs, no one beats Akamai. Ustream must use Akamai in their delivery network.
As far as pricing is concerned, you can complain all you want about the high prices, but live video delivery is not a cheap business. The cheapest rate my clients have gotten from Akamai is 35 cents a viewer hour, and we’re talking about very significant up front commitments and payments. Don’t even think about asking for Pay-as-U-Go.
The problem with going to Akamai directly is you also have to develop your own front end players, nevermind all the features you get with Ustream or Mogulus pro. With Watershed and Mogulus Pro, you’re tapping into a fully baked front-end and backend live streaming platform, as opposed to just the backend delivery you get from going directly through Akamai.
Given Ustream’s superior free service’s track record, this is a very compelling product. Is it cheap? No, but neither is live streaming in general. I’m actually quite surprised how cheap this package is, especially since they’re charging by pay-as-you-go viewer hours, rather than data delivery. Now, if they’re charging a premium for higher upload rates (and thus higher quality), I’ll have to re-evaluate; but from the looks of it, seems like Ustream is emphasizing the straight forward nature of their pricing.
I reserve final judgement until I actually test the damn thing; but from my years of experience live streaming, this is a promising product at a decent price.
That price is insane. At 500kbps, one viewer hour is about 225 MB. ((500kbps/8)*60*60). That works out to roughly 4.5 viewer hours per gigabyte, or $4.50 per gigabyte served for the little guys.
That’s some serious moxy. And profit margin.
I just signed up and tried Watershed. It was simple, straightforward, and a great user experience.
I went live under my own brand and I can now see why Pay-As-You-Go is powerful. I really don’t want to pay for anything unless I use it.
Pay-As-You-Go is great!
Thanks Ustream for bringing an amazing service to the internet. I bet this will be like the Cloud for Live.
I’m pumped!
Hmm, lot of negatives for people that haven’t even tried it yet, me? Think I will wait to try it before I post anything negative..( maybe competitors). However reading the ustream forums there evidently is a tremendous interest in an ad free, white label environment if they could buy it from ustream. Once again ustream appears to have responded to what the public wants..
I’ve been using their service free of charge and don’t think the extra bells and whistles justify the up-cost.
I’ll continue to use the free version!
Windows Live Meeting might be a cheaper alternative depending on how your company works.
Wow – $7,500 for 30,000 people for half an hour huh?
Let’s compare to live broadcast math.
I can buy HD satellite time for about $1200 per full hour of use – slightly less than that for fiber to a broadcast center (granted, you have to be shooting somewhere where you have access to fiber or satellite uplink…)
You still have to buy the time on the distribution platform, like an infomercial buy, which can be several thousand dollars in a crappy timeslot, but you can reach 100K viewers easily.
It seems like the only real savings producing live content this way (Ustream/Watershed) is on the frontend where you can produce in your garage if you’d like.
I know we’re not apples to apples here at all – but still – this is one area where Mark Cuban may be right, for a while.
A 60 minutes 300Kbps stream takes up about 135MB in one hour. Depending on the level of commitment with a CDN, you could see pricing at around $0.25 per GB. UStream is charging $0.25 per HOUR, meaning they are charging more than SEVEN times what a CDN would charge.
There is some value to their application and that is clearly what they are charging customers to have access to. But seven times the going rate is pretty steep.
If you’re even thinking of paying for live streaming service, why would you upload at 300 kbps? I would think you’d want to stream twice that rate.
And .25 cents per gig? You MUST be making huge up front commits to get that rate, unless you’re dealing with a substandard CDN.
Only way I see Ustream making much margins on this is on the power of their bulk delivery purchase. To the individual broadcaster, I think this has got to be a fair price.
And remember, you’re getting more than just pure video delivery. You’re tapping into a fully fleshed platform. You save money just by nixing the costs of hiring a professional webcaster to figure out the whole damn thing…. like me!
all based on bitrate or quality….at 750 kbps, 1.5 Mbps w/pay-as-you-go…makes sense
Just signed up. Pretty cool.
Congrats to the Ustream.tv team for launching their White-label Pro version.
To help potential customers/Techcrunch readers compare the pricing between Mogulus Pro and Ustream Watershed, we published a quick price translator/comparison tool.
In summary :
- If you deliver more that 500 viewing hours a month (meaning you have under 1 concurent viewers on average during the month) – Mogulus Pro will always be a more cost effective solution.
- Despite our minimum commitment (350US$/month – month-to-month), Mogulus Pro is shown to be half the price in most cases over 500 viewing hours a month.
- If Chris Pirillo was a Ustream Watershed customer – he would be paying half the price on Mogulus Pro.
Max Haot
CEO Mogulus
Its not apples to apples because Mogulus Pro to me seems to be inferior.
Really? Just by looking at the features, both Watershed and Mogulus Pro seem to have a lot of similar, nice functionality and features. Ustream has always been simple and easy to use. But I like the advanced features of Mogulus, especially the fact that they let you stream on-demand and scheduled programming.
I’ll have to try both Watershed and Mogulus Pro… either way, it’s nice to have options!
Lets calculate an other case. Imagine that you have a site with 10000 users (not a big number). You want to make them possible to live broadcast. With watershed you will play xzy$ with Mogulus Pro … oops you can have only 10 channels…
you want 10,000 channels… each user having their own channel? or you want to stream to 10,000 users with one channel?
Neal: imagine for example a dating site, where every user can broadcast about themself, imagine a callcenter, imagine a ustream like site, imagine an online language school, these all can’t be build upon Mogulus, while it is limited to 10 channels.
Or imagine a not free of charge service, where you want to protect your stream, you can’t do this with Mogulus, while there is no time control.
Or imagine that you want to make accessible your stream only on you domain, or you want to make it accessible only for authenticated users, you can’t do this with Mogulus.
These are all legitimate use cases which you can easily build using Watershed.
If you want to build your custom broadcaster or viewer (again a legitimate business need), you can’t do this with Mogulus, but Watershed offers a safe API for this too, and a lot more.
Max,
You calculated this wrong unfortunately. Ustream’s unit pricing is for all VH’s in that range, not different for each range.
Quick math: The pricing is basically the same for Watershed and Mogulus. Where it gets interesting is since Mogulus is on GB usage, its actually HIGHER cost at bitrates above 400 kbps.
Max,
Your product is cheaper because it sucks. Choppy and buggy.
I canceled after one month. How do I process a return?
Unfortunately I would have to agree. I have been left out in the cold several times with terrible connectivity to Mogulus servers, especially on Sundays for some strange reason. We’ve lost clients and business because of it.
Their tech support used to be quick and responsive but now is in the toilet. We’ve switched to uStream for their overall stability. I hope they add multi-camera support (being able to cue cameras and transition between them) soon. But for now I’ll take a stable, less feature-rich platform over the anxiety of wondering “Will Mogulus will work today?”
(Also their studio application desparately needs an HTML/non-flash alternative as it can be terribly slow and unresponsive)
I just don’t see this going anywhere – its way too much money, the value simply isn’t there.
So how does this compare to a company like Feedroom? They already offer this level of service though pricing is more subscription based.
$ 7,500 huh? I’ll just take the branded version…
Lifecasters should take the free.
Businesses, the ads and Ustream logo aren’t really a option.
What is the deal with Ustream? They have no idea what they are doing.
First ripping off content for the Inaugurations to get some cheap press. Dangerous game.
Now this. Are Ustream crazy? Obviously their investors are crazy.. band of ______s. If you sign up to this you have too much money to burn. Just use Akamai, Level3, Limelight or one of the other CDNs desperate to get your business with much better service.
Ustream…. Uturn needed on you business model.
Go back to building cheap houses guys… phew!
Ustream partnered with news stations for the Inauguration streams. That’s why they were mentioned in the partner press releases.
Too emotional CDNguy, obviously from Moglus
I evaluated the #s for our company/IT dept. and here’s what I found:
It comes down to streaming quality or bitrate. I’ve noticed with Watershed you can choose your own quality/bitrate. So you pay the same whether you’re streaming at 300 kbps or 1.5 Mbps. I like this because it gives us flexibility as sometimes we need HQ or HD and sometimes 300 kbps is fine.
I found that at approx. 600 kbps Watershed is more economical than Moglus pro. I hate monthy fees or being locked in. I hate wasted bandwidth too. I appreciate the Pay-As-You-Go and choose your own quality.
The mogulus guy’s calculations were wrong too. He added spin to make Watershed seem more by calculating cumulative pricing vs. tiered pricing. Watershed explains that if you 1,500 viewer hours you pay $0.75…not 1,000 at $1 and 500 at $0.75 so mogulis guy is tricky.
All in all, I like higher quality, premium technology and pay-as-you-go flexibility. Don’t like being penalized for higher quality or being locked in…
I could see a lot of churches using this.
Kevin Herring
Atl Church of Christ
I can see churches using it because they constantly solicit money (not a slam, just a little truth) -they might could cover their cost… but not anyone else. It’s just entirely too expensive.
I’ve got a great idea for a streaming service, but at these cost (no matter the service provider) it simply isn’t time. Today’s prices are like buying a first generation flat screen…
Not sure I agree.
I just got out of my Limelight contract which was much higher priced than this with a minimum I had to pay each month.
Looks interesting – pricing is weird, but the service will seem cool.
Well in my opinion Mogulus and Ustream are both overpriced compared to make.tv.
Here a short calculation (stream watched by 30,000 people for a half hour => 900,000 viewer minutes)
ustream: $7,500
maketv whitelabel: (150.000 minutes already included) $2,360
http://make.tv/...payment?lang=en
What if, like the puppies, your viewership goes from an intended audience of say, 2 to 3 to suddenly bouncing up to millions… that’s someone bankrupt almost immediately, though I assume (based on not having made use of it) you could lock / password protect viewing to stop people who weren’t intended from watching it?
I run over their documentation and Watershed provide solution for this too. There are a lot lock types which you can even combine to get the desired functioning.
Check these two links:
https://watersh...curity_settings
https://watersh...curity_settings
So I have a large company, I want to stream continuous newsletter items that my employees can check out whenever they want. I know that only a few will occasionally check in but that veiwership will occasionally spike, quarterly returns, yearly insurance info and maybe fiscal end of year announcements, stockholders info, etc. And all I have to supply is a camera and web feed, and DVD player, I dont get charged when no one is watching, sounds great to me, and if that pricing structure is real, sounds economical to me. A couple of airline flights to deliver the message in person will easily pay for that…
Is it not a conflict of interest that Ustream’s Watershed now has an ad at the top of the TechCrunch blog?
These products are not the same.
Mogulus is a “Pro” Account and basic.
Ustream is a true enterprise solution.
We aren’t comparing apples to apples.
geez!
After seeing Max’s post, it’s obvious these comments are from Max Hoat. I’ve never read comments so negative/filled with insecurity/attacking on Techcrunch kinda obvious…
LOWEST PRICE generally means CHEAPEST PRODUCT.
Not sure I would be proud nor public about that.
glad I saw this post…some entertainment value!
I only see me using about 40 private viewer hours a month, who’s cheapest?
ustream would be $40, mogulus would be $350. Pay as you go > subscription fee
Is this a joke? CDNGuy is right on. find me 1 person excited about paying $7500 for any unnecessary service at this moment in time. this post has attracted 20? And they’ve done ample research? Stberg happened to do IT dept streaming price comparisons the day this launches? Every video streaming related post on TC is filled with this astroturf.
You want a good service, you must pay.
What is it with “I want it for Free”
Please explain why “you” want US to pay for you!
We use the Streamn.com streaming service. It works great, is viewable using windows media player and is cheap. Great for churhces or anything with viewers less than 1000 people.
This post said that Watershed includes “polling, picture-in-picture video chat, Twitter integration”. Where is the info on that?
Have a nice day.
I’m a “young” streaming user (from dec. 2008) and i’ve tested quite every services.
Everyone has his “strengths” but in the dream of a user no one have all the features that we like.
I stay in europe, so the live streaming is a little bit difficult for the “hop” needed to reach the us servers and so need much more upload bandwidth that other us users: this is a point on which that big players have to remember for the growth of their business because Europe is not so little.
- Mogulus
I find mogulus user friendly and with a lot of features (most of all the slow but good Studio) that meet quit all the needs of my customers. The free version is (in the most of the case) sufficient for low level customers (and hope that in the future it will be deleted like options for clean the market from the milions of “embedder” programmer that make the customer confused). Mogulus is a business driver for a lot of little software house in my opinion, and needs multicamera live features and a transition section for to be one of the best.
- Usstream
simply and stable. this are the words that i can use for describe their services. Need to have a “studio” solution, multicamera and pip at least. the new business model can be interesting but is not the best (like Internap can offer)
- Make tv
This guys have the best interface of all, far milions of miles from the other and really is a totaly studio console: multi-pip, cue from unlimited remote camera, MIX between local video and remote live stream, chroma key (2 keys), alpha etc are really the best of the market. Titling is not good as the other features (not rolling or scrolling) but they are so near the “goal”.. Their studio application needs to be more reliable again, and their business plan are interesting.
-CDN
Yes. at least for a good business their offer the best price for the “pure” services. You need to do Your interface, your application, etc but they are moving for offer it (without claim) to the “end business customers”. From those that i Tested Velocix, SimplyCDN and Streamzilla was for my needs the best. Internap has the best business plan offer that i REALLY HOPE to find everywhere:
Pay for GB of traffic, NO MATTER of how much bandwidth do you use or need (for concurrent viewers), no mounths prefixed fee, JUST PAY for 1 user ad 300Kbits or 1000 at 1.5 Kbits traffic. I found this the “peace” of heart respect to the
waste of the costs of the other business models (for example in one mounth you can use half of your prepayed traffic/bandwidht/what_also_over and payed the mountly fee, and in another mount for just one day of peek event you have to pay the “burst” plus the base fees).
At moment the dream solution for me is the Make.tv interface, on the streamzilla cdn, with the stability of usstream, and some features (and the “friendly”) of the mogulus studio, but it is far to come.
like alway no one have the best solution for all business, every one has some “strengths”, BUT the business model that ALL US can ask to ALL their can be a simply PAY-AS-YOU-CONSUME model, like from years the
telephone companies did (and it’s more simply to explain the model to OUR customers).
My 2 cents