The idea led Graham to delay the application deadline for YC Winter 2010 startups for two days, so they could release two new Requests For Startups (RFS), YC’s recently announced program that gives applicants basic big picture ideas from which to form startups around. One of these new RFSes is obviously to build something on top of Twitter. Here’s the description:

RFS 3: Things Built on Twitter

Twitter is important because it’s a new protocol. Fundamentally it’s a messaging protocol where you don’t specify the recipients. It’s really more of a discovery than an invention; that square was always there in the periodic table of protocols, but no one had quite hit it squarely.

Successful new protocols are rare. There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP (the Internet), SMTP (email), HTTP (the web), and so on. So any new protocol is a big deal. Each one of those protocols has spawned many successful companies. Twitter will too.

We want to fund those companies. And the people at Twitter also want to encourage people to built stuff on top of it. So together we came up with a plan: anyone YC funds to do a startup based on Twitter will get priority access to the Twitter stream, and to people at Twitter.

Twitter hasn’t specified exactly what type of access to its stream YC startups will get (there are a number of levels with various call rate limits). But the assumption is that these startups will get the type of access that Twitter gives to its preferred third-party developers.

And the access to the Twitter team may be even more vital. Twitter is in the process of rolling out several new APIs for new features it is working on like Lists, Retweets, and Geolocation. Having face time with Twitter’s team for these types of things could certainly help YC startup build some great tools on top of the platform.

On the flip-side, Twitter will see a group of hand-selected startups that at the very least have interesting ideas for what to do with the platform.

Alongside the new Twitter RFS, Y Combinator is also announcing a RFS for live video. This is the result of a similar partnership (as the Twitter one) with Justin.TV that will give YC startups that work on this RFS the best access to Justin.TV’s stream, as well as access to the company’s founders and engineers.

The new Winter 2010 deadline for YC will be October 28 at 10 pm Pacific.

[photo: flickr/JChetan]

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“Archive video has clearly exploded all over the internet, but live video hasn’t. We think it’s because more flexibility is needed that no single product can meet, but an open platform can.”

The API, which has been in closed testing for about a month now, will now be available to anyone who wishes to use it, for free. Justin.tv can do this because they’ve made live video cheap to serve. Their internal network has capacity for some 100 million hours of video viewing per month, we’re told. For some perspective, that’s roughly 2.5% of media giant Comcast’s capacity, but Justin.tv is run at a fraction of the cost.

And it’s not like it’s totally free with no strings attached. The initial launch of the API will be supported by ads. And eventually, a payment platform will be built-in to the API as well for developers who wish to service live video ad-free. In those cases, there would be revenue sharing with Justin.tv, we’re told. Still, the ad-supported free model makes it very compelling next to Stickam’s StreamAPI and Ustream’s offerings, both of which charge per view hour.

But costs aside, the key here is the access to the live video. Justin.tv is just one company and needs to maintain its core product, which means side projects like Camtweet, which was unveiled at our Real-time Stream event earlier this month and was built using this new API, aren’t going to pop up everyday. But with developers given access to the same tools, now Justin.tv doesn’t need to worry about doing all the work, it can have the community help is making cool new live video applications.

And just to give developers so ideas of what they can do with this API, Justin.tv internally made a few simple live video apps besides Camtweet. They are:

• A group chat application that allows an arbitrary number of broadcasts to be displayed on a single page as people join
• A Mac OSX dashboard widget that plays live video, allows search and includes a chat room–you can download this here, but please don’t share the URL http://soda.berkeley.edu/~kfb/jtv_dashboard.zip
• An automated event widget that can be embedded anywhere–once you setup an event the widget shows a countdown timer, automatically switches to a live video broadcast and then creates and displays a highlight clip after the event ends
• A baby monitor that alerts you when something happens in the broadcast–you can try this one out here http://www.slumbervision.com/

You can get access to these, dig into them, and get documentation on Justin.tv’s API wiki found here. You can also find the source code for Camtweet, which has been open-sourced, on Github here.

I suspect we may see the other live video services follow suit with free, ad-supported APIs. We watched them all rush to serve live video on Facebook’s platform last month, but opening it up to any app developer on the web for free is potentially much more interesting.

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Ten days ago at our Real Time Stream CrunchUp, Justin.tv demonstrated a new beta product they are working on called CamTweet. It lets you launch a live video broadcast using your computer Webcam, Tweet it out to your followers on Twitter with a link to help gather an audience, and then keep the viral Tweets going by letting the audience sign into a chat box with their Twitter accounts so that each comment gets Tweeted out to their followers with a link back to the video.

It is a really simple, but powerful idea. So simple, in fact, that one of Justin.TV’s competitors, Livestream CEO Max Haot (who was watching the demo from New York via UStream, another live Web video competitor) decided to create the exact same product using Livestream’s new, yet-to-be released APIs.

What he came up with is Twitcam, which is live now. You sign in with your Twitter account (not yet through OAuth, though, which is subpar), hit broadcast, and you are off to the races. Comments are all routed through Twitter as well. You might be able to catch Max doing a test livestream here.

While pulling in people from Twitter to watch your live video stream might help with the live video audience problem, but it doesn’t do anything to make the actual live video streams any better than before. There is still a quality/boredom problem when it comes to live video because live video is really hard. But there is nothing like a real audience to force people to pick up their game.

What this proves is that no Twitter-related idea can remain uncopied for long. Twitcam launched before CamTweet even went into private beta. (Justin.TV is getting ready to release private beta invites later today—stay tuned). There are simply no barriers to entry for any Twitter app. And first-mover advantages are fleeting (see TinyURL Vs. Bit.ly). Better hurry up there, Justin.TV.

Update: Justin.TV has just thrown the switch for CamTweet, which you can try out here. Compare and contrast.

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The new site has an overall cleaner and simplified look. And simplification is the key to another big change: The addition of big front page broadcaster. When you first load up the site you will see front and center a large video player with the phrase “Live broadcasting in one click.” If you click on the big red button below it, you’ll load up your camera options screen, where you pick a camera to record from. From there you can log-in or create an account to start broadcasting.

Previously, you had to log-in or set up an account first and could then start recording on a different page. This new way makes it much more obvious how to get recording right away.

Another change is the addition of a Meebo IM chat bar to each page on the site. Previously, chat only existed in channel chat rooms, but now the Meebo bar will allow you to continually chat no matter where you are on the site. Justin.tv says it’s the first live video site to use the Meebo bar, and has already seen 10% of its chat messages coming through as IMs, rather than in the chat areas on channels. That’s about 600,000 IMs out of 6 millon messages a day, we’re told. Expect that number to go up now that it’s sitewide.

As I said, Justin.tv remains the top live streaming site, but its competitors have all been making moves recently to try and spur usage. One big move was Mogulus recently rebranding to Livestream. Traffic to all of these sites across the board seems to be slipping. But when Ustream launched a redesign a year ago, it helped kick start growth.

Justin.tv just launched its Camtweet, live video on Twitter service, last week at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp. This new simplified Justin.tv main experience, seems like an extension of the idea of simplicity, which I like. Justin.tv also launched a DVR feature last month.

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Camtweet looks kind of like what the various photo and video sharing sites that are tied to Twitter currently look like, except it has a big live video box in the center. Below that is the place where you chat to others who are watching in your Camtweet (or Justin.tv — the videos will reside on both) room. And these messages are tweeted out with a link to bring people back to the room. Then when they login with their Twitter credentials and chat with you on the page, their messages are tweeted out too.

The interface is dead simple, and it seems like a good idea if Justin.tv can get some big name Twitter users to use it. We’ll start seeing tweets flying around with links back to hot Camtweet live video chats, which some users may not like, but should mean huge traffic for Camtweet.

The closest thing to this so far has been Qik which does live video from mobile devices and can easily be set up to auto-tweet out when recordings start. The difference is that first of all this is meant for live video from the desktop, not a mobile device, and second, is the aforementioned huge potential for streams to go viral since chat is run through Twitter (with links back to Camtweet) as well. And Qik is being slightly held back by the fact that Apple and/or AT&T will not allow its app (or any other app the sends out live video from the iPhone) into the App Store.

As I mentioned, all of this video will also reside back on Justin.tv’s main site, where it will be archived as well.

Here’s a video of the demo of Camtweet from the Real-Time Stream Event:

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While most live-streaming services offer archives of live recorded video, the nice feature here is the simple way to pick up just where you left off watching something. The feature, rolling out this afternoon, will offer a bar under each video that will read, “Continue watching this later.” If you click on it, all that live video will be recorded so that you can come back to it at a time of your choosing. You’ll receive a link to a place to come back and watch it with a message that looks like:

Use the link below to continue watching this broadcast when you have time, starting from what you’re watching right now (to within a few minutes).
This link will continue to work for 7 days.

You could also use this link to share with friends if you all wanted to pick up watching something together. Unfortunately, unlike TV DVR, there is no way to fast-forward through parts that you may want to skip. But I’m told that such functionality is likely in the works for a later release.

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Live video on the Web is starting to take off, judging by the massive jump in traffic that Justin.tv is witnessing. According to comScore, the live video site’s global audience saw a massive jump from 9.3 million unique visitors in January to 15 million in February, which is about the same number of people who went to Veoh and nearly twice as many as visited Hulu.com. Of course, Hulu is only available in the U.S., where it is fourth most popular video site, and its videos are watched on other sites as well. In the U.S., ComScore only shows Justin.tv attracting 1.4 million people in February. So most of its audience and growth is global, with particular strength in Spain, Brazil, Germany, and the UK.

Quantcast, which directly measures all three sites, shows a similar trend. Globally, Justin.tv has 22.1 million monthly uniques, compared to 15.8 million for Hulu, and 11.9 million for Veoh. While the U.S. numbers are 3.9 million for Justin.tv, 14 million for Hulu, and 4 million for Veoh. (Ustream.tv seems to be the second-largest live video streaming site with 6.7 million global monthly visitors and 1.4 million in the U.S.). These are all site numbers, Quantcast also measures “network” numbers which presumably includes videos embedded elsewhere, and those are about double the site stats for each service. Justin.tv itself claims 1,800 percent year-over-year growth in unique visitors based on its internal Google Analytics numbers.

What all of these number show is that live video is beginning to make its mark, and could soon challenge the top video sites for the attention of audiences. There are 428,000 channels broadcasting live video on Justin.tv. Of those, 40,000 channels broadcast 1.75 million hours of video each day. And the level of engagement seems to be just as high as on regular video sites. ComScore’s VideoMetrix estimates that the average Justin.tv viewer in ethe US. watches just over an hour a month (64.7 minutes), almost exactly the same as a Veoh viewer (64.5 minutes), but still well below a Hulu viewer (87.2 minutes).

So why is Justin.tv so popular overseas? Could it be all the live sports events streamed over the service? Soccer and female wrestling seem to be particulraly popular.

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In the down economy, startups are trying everything they can think of to keep a steady flow of revenue coming in. For popular live-streaming video site Justin.tv, it looks like one of these measures is to try to capitalize on its users’ frequent searches for porn: if you run queries for terms like “xxx” or “sex”, the site will automatically redirect you to a third-party pornography page.

Before users are redirected, they’re presented with a message for five seconds indicating that while Justin.tv has banned adult content, the site is sending them to “a site where you can find what you’re looking for”. The new “feature” may be flying under the banner of convenience, but the site is clearly looking for a new source of income. Justin.tv may well be having trouble coping in the current economy, and a porn affiliate pays far more than a blank search results page.

I don’t think there’s anything morally wrong with what Justin.tv is doing – it’s highly unlikely anyone is going to accidentally search the site for “xxx” and get offended when they’re sent to a porn site (though they might get annoyed). But the new ‘feature’ doesn’t gel with much of the content on the site, which features clips of puppies and video games on its home page. And the site should really include a page confirming that the user is over 18 before redirecting them (there seems to be no such confirmation found on at least some of the redirected porn sites).

Above all, I sincerely hope this isn’t the start of a new trend. I hate when sites redirect me without my permission, and fear that other startups could expand on this technique to include other search categories – how annoying would it be if a search for “soccer” sent users to Nike’s homepage? It may sound like an extreme case, but many startups are getting desperate, and a good user experience is often among the first things sacrificed as they try to stay afloat.

Update 2/19/09: CEO Michael Seibel says that Justin.tv has discontinued the practice.

While the goal of redirecting inappropriate search queries was to discourage this type of content on site, this solution has unfortunately created the misperception that we support or condone this content. As a result, we have decided to discontinue redirecting search queries to third party sites. The queries that were being redirected now return zero results.

Update: Justin.tv CEO Michael Seibel has sent us the following response to this story:

Justin.tv uses a variety of common tools to effectively reduce the
amount of inappropriate content on the site including: community-based
reporting, community admins, chat moderation and redirecting
sex-related search queries.

Lets be clear, this isn’t the magical solution for monetizing Web 2.0,
these tools exclusively help us to improve the community experience on
the site.

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We’d heard rumors that Google had partnered with one of the big three live streaming services – Mogulus, Ustream or Justin.TV. And in fact Google has met with all of those startups to discuss partnerships or an outright acquisition.

But instead of working with them, or building their own streaming media CDN, they chose to work with Akamai. Google won’t confirm this, but it’s fairly trivial to detect (see screen shot below). Why did they go with Akamai instead of partnering? One key factor may be that Mogulus, Ustream and Justin.tv haven’t streamed live events with much more than 100,000 simultaneous viewers (correction: one person associated with Justin.tv emails to say they’ve hit “well over 400,000″), so tonight’s concert would have been an experiment in scalability for them.

It appears based on public Akamai data that about 700,000 people were watching the YouTube concert at its peak. There’s more information on the Mogulus blog, but basically Akamai was serving about 150,000 live streams across its networks right before the event started, and 863,000 at the peak of the concert.

All this expensive CDN infrastructure really isn’t necessary to handle live video streams effectively. P2P software can handle it effectively and far cheaper since the users are serving most of the video to others. That requires getting software directly onto user’s computers, however, something Joost tried and has mostly abandoned. Eventually this stuff will likely just be built into the browser directly.

One thing tonight proved – Akamai may be expensive, but it sure does work. I wonder if Google will let them issue a press release about it.

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Justin.tv, one of the first live video streaming sites, has announced its 1 millionth registered user since its launch in March 2007.

Justin.tv has a number competitors, namely Stickam, Mogulus, and Ustream.tv, but has managed to keep a strong presence in the space (maintaining attention along the way with a number of media stunts). We’ve analyzed the competition several times.

In March we took a look at Justin.tv’s growth through its first year of operation. In that post, we included user and data statistics until that point, and we’ve included a similar set today:

1,721,868 friendships made
90,690 channels created
522,794 favorited channels
95,253 video highlights saved
29,167 playlists generated
24,478 events broadcasted
61,562 video clips uploaded to youtube
62,278 twitter messages sent
16,294 myspace bulletins sent
119 years of video broadcasted & archived

Justin.tv has seen explosive growth since March, gaining 650,000 new users and the equivalent of 62 more years of video to be exact. Below is a chart that represents their growth in weekly new registered users for the past year.

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Both of these measure only the traffic to the main Websites of each competing live Web video service, and do not include how many people watch the videos in embeddable players elsewhere on the Web. But they are apples-to-apples and should give a good indication of the overall trend.

Ustream.tv, at least, realizes it needs to change something in order to catch up. Today it launched a redesign of its site, which gives DIY broadcasters the ability to add text and graphic overlays to their videos and better metrics on how many people are watching their videos. Also, viewers can now subscribe to specific broadcasters. The company claims 10 million unique viewers overall for the month of June, including videos watched offsite. It has 410,000 registered users. 100,000 of them are active and are broadcasting 10,000 to 15,000 live events a day Some of its better known users include Johnny Knoxville, Dane Cook, James Blunt, The Plain White Ts, and both Presidential campaigns. Steve Gillmor, the editor of TechCrunchIT, uses it as well for his NewsGang Live show.

But that right there might just be the problem. Would you rather watch Steve Gillmor talking with his wife about Twitter on a split screen while her cat climbs the couch in the background (this is actually on right now), or French cowgirls in bikinis on Justin.tv? No offense, Steve, but the featured live streams on Justin.tv just seem younger and more fun than the stuff on Ustream.tv.

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Now, a user named Chowda633 manages to accidentally catch his neighbor robbing his apartment. More details on the Justin.tv blog.

I guess this proves that if you point a camera at anything long enough, something interesting might happen.

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The basics

Obviously you’ll need a camera to get started in video; if you’re a Mac user you might have a cam built in, but if not web cam’s are fairly cheap. Alternatively people like Chris Pirillo stream from a professional video camera, but even a second hand older model can also work, for both live and recorded shows to computer. For camera effects, CamTwist for the Mac is free and fully featured with effects such as text, clocks, image overlays, Picture in Picture, and much more. Fix8 (our coverage here) offers cartoon style overlays if animation or funny faces are more your thing.

Recording

You’ll have two ways of recording a video: local or to the web. Local could directly on to a camcorder through to Quicktime or something in-between. Quicktime Pro (between $30-$45) does the recording and it’s a quick and easy solution. To the web means recording your video directly to a website; the advantages are that you don’t have to upload it and it’s available immediately, however depending on your internet connection the recording quality can be significantly poorer than recording a video locally and uploading it. YouTube offers the direct recording option and is an obvious candidate, but the Live streaming services also allow you to record to their services and even distribute your video out to sites like YouTube later. I’ve also found that the quality of the live stream services can often be higher in recording than YouTube.

Streaming Live

Live in the newest sector in online video with venture capital being spread around a range of services. Live offers some advantages over doing recorded video alone (although they are not mutually exclusive); streaming live means you can interact with and network with your audience while creating archive footage than can be distributed later. Companies in this space include Justin.tv, Ustream.tv, Mogulus, BlogTV, Stickam and others. All of the services have strengths and weaknesses and you should explore each one, but if you haven’t got time for that I’d recommend Justin.tv or Ustream.tv. Ustream.tv is attracting the professional, higher quality streaming shows so if you want to be in that space, you’ll be well positioned. Their tool set including full video conversion makes for a solid product. Justin.tv has a slant towards a younger, Gen Y audience, and if you’re pitching more to that audience it’s the better place to be. I also found when testing both that Justin.tv was more reliable for streaming quality from outside of the United States, and at times Ustream.tv was unusable for me, even on a 14mb down, 1mb up ADSL2 connection; you wouldn’t experience this in the US however. Of the others, Mogulus has a stronger emphasis on professional video and doesn’t have the strong community yet, BlogTV has a lot of potential, and Stickam seems to be dominated by soft porn, at least when I visited it.

Distribution

I asked Chris Pirillo for some tips for this post and one of his key points was simply: “you must understand that (a) It’s all about YouTube, and (b) It’s all about YouTube.” Like it or not YouTube dominates online video today more than Google dominates search in the United States. Other video bloggers I’ve spoken to suggest distribution to many sites, but always making sure YouTube is top of the list. TubeMogul is one the oldest of the video distribution sites, and is simple to use and free. You upload your video to their servers, enter you user name and password for a list of sites (first time only) then press the button and off they go. TubeMogul also tracks traffic statistics from each site so you can see which videos are being watched there. An alternative service is Hey!Spread (our review here).

The other consideration in distribution is getting your video onto other devices, like iPods. The key is to provide the correct file type and feed for services such as iTunes. You can do it manually with a WordPress plugin and by making sure the file is available on your server in the correct format, or you can use Blip.tv.

We’ve covered the occasional content deal on Blip.tv but we’ve never seriously looked at their distribution platform, and it’s the reason shows like Rocketboom, Mahalo Daily and Moblogic are using Blip.tv. On top of the obvious video hosting everyone in this space provides, Blip.tv also offers distribution to external blogs (including an automatic option), the Internet Archive, de.licio.us (links), Flickr (pics from the video), Adobe Media Player, MySpace, Twitter (text alerts), Facebook, Yahoo Video, AOL Video, Akimbo, Lycos Mix, MeeVee, MeFeedia, Meebo, Blinkx, Splashcast, Pando and the most important one of all: iTunes. Blip.tv offers an iTunes subscription feed and file conversion service; users do have to manually go to the dashboard within Blip.tv and request the file conversion on a free account, but with a premium account ($8/ mth or $80/ yr) get the conversion done automatically. A premium account also has other benefits, such as priority file transcoding that in my testing made it the quickest service available (that is time from when the video was uploaded until it was ready to view).

There was an argument between Ze Frank and Rocketboom a year or two back where Ze Frank disputed Rocketboom’s viewer numbers as they were reporting 10x the traffic of Ze’s The Show. The key to Rocketboom’s success has always been distribution, and for a long time you couldn’t open a media player without seeing Rocketboom pre-loaded. Distribution is key, and combining services like TubeMogul and Blip.tv make it a lot easier.

Content

Chris Pirillo told me that the key is to make sure every video has something different, and that you should use supportive text with each video posted as Google loves text. Ultimately what you decide to create is up to you: it may be something simple like a web cam chat, or you may want to get more creative. We cant tell you what will work for you, but the easiest way to start is to get on YouTube and just see what different people are doing, you’re sure to find something to inspire you.

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Ustream.TV

Ustream.TV was in the first wave of live broadcast sites that launched in 2007 along with Justin.TV, BlogTV and Mogulus. Ustream.TV took $2 million in angel funding in December and appointed General Wesley Clark to the board. Rumors surface in January that the company was in takeover talks with Microsoft with a $50 million price tag.

Ustream.TV has grown from its original launch to become a broadcast hub for Presidential hopefuls, popular entertainers and musicians, technology industry gurus and business executives. The live broadcasting service has been complemented with a depth of tools that allows people like Chris Pirillo to build a video empire. Ustream.TV offers video conversion and download in .FLV, .WMV, .MP4 and .MOV, and users can syndicate videos created from live shows on video sites such as Blip.tv. According to Ustream.TV, their traffic has grown 325% over the last 6 months.

Ustream.TV said the funding would be used to accelerate product development and “meet market demand for a live online video broadcasting platform that allows people all over the world to engage in real-time.”

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Here are some more stats provided by the company, both cumulative for the past year and for the past 30 days:

1 Year Statistics:

* 87,331,037 pageviews
* 24,954,403 unique visitors
* 57 years of archives
* 28,106 total channels
* 356,197 registered users
* 73,754 user created video clips

Last 30 day stats

* 21,409,755 pageviews
* 5,963,775 uniques
* 11 years of archives
* 6,954 new channels
* 73,534 registered users
* 26,500 user created video clips

Peaks:

* 3.6 gbps video
* 32,000 simultaneous viewers

Update 2: Justin.TV reviewed its stats, and believes that its website analytics software, StatCounter, overcounts unique visitors. So it has provided the following data from Google Analytics, which vastly diminishes its unique visitor count in the past 30 days from 6 million to 1.6 million. This is really lame, but at least they fessed up. And this is why I always try to go with comScore—better to undercount than overcount.

1 Year Statistics:
85,335,630 pageviews
4,823,411 absolute unique visitors

Last 30 day stats:
21,859,147 pageviews
1,560,112 absolute unique visitors

Update: Here is a graph from Justin.TV, of only its site’s pageviews, unique visitors, and returning visitors (worldwide):

Here are the comScore stats for the site alone. (Justin.TV is the red line). Note that these tell a very different story, with only 293,000 uniques in February (compared to the 6 million—(update) make that 1.6 million— claimed by the company). These are all U.S. stats, but the trends roughly match the worldwide stats from comScore as well. I present them here only to give a sense of how it is doing as a destination site versus some of its competitors. (Here is Alexa and Compete). As a destination site, it looks to be doing better than UStream and BlogTV:

But not quite as well as Kyte.TV or StickCam (although the numbers are so low for all of these sites, that it is still anybody’s game):

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With the new service, Justin.TV users will have a option to stream from a mobile phone directly from their control panel without the need to have a Qik account. The integration is seamless, and the only difference in the video feed will be a Qik logo somewhere on the screen.

Qik has grown rapidly since first launching in invite only alpha testing. Despite not being open for signups, the service has over 2000 regular users (Scoble and Calacanis among them) and is growing at approx. 20% a week. Justin.TV needs little introduction, having created the live streaming genre and gone on to become a highly popular service.

I spoke to Justin.TV’s Michael Seibel and Qik’s Bhaskar Roy prior to today’s announcement. Justin.TV sees the deal as a value add for its users that gives it an edge over competitors. I mentioned Qik’s partnership with Mogulus and Seibel said that Justin.TV doesn’t see Mogulus as a competitor, noting that while their focus is on webcams and quick to use and stream shows, Mogulus is focused on high quality, TV level productions. Roy said that Qik sees the partnership as another way to get their service out to more users, and that after their testing phase they are ready for the growth the Justin.TV deal will bring.

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Sarah Meyers got the scoop (video above), transcript as follows care of NewTeeVee:

Meyers: “When are you guys gonna do live video on YouTube?”

Chen: “2008. We’ll do it this year.

“Live video is just something that we’ve always wanted to do, we’ve never had the resources to do it correctly, but now with Google, we hope to actually do it this year.”

Now for the guessing game: which live video startup will fold first once YouTube dominates the market? YouTube will be last to market, but the same momentum that has seen YouTube dominate video will now be applied to live video. Like video, content creators want to be on the service that gives them the most exposure, no matter how good the alternatives area (after all, YouTube doesn’t offer the best quality video). YouTube already has the user base; live video streamers will flock to YouTube like a moth to a flame.

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LiveVideo.com

LiveVideo.com offers the following features:

• show archiving, so users can record shows to be played back later
• embedding of live streams
• chat associated with the stream
• video conferencing Yahoo Live style, in that users can add other streaming users to their page and interact with them
• Comment board/ profile page similar to YouTube where users can leave comments
• Photo gallery, no quite Flickr, but allows users to share photos

LiveUniverse is pitching LiveVideo.com as “the first fully interactive, global, live streaming platform;” it’s not, but it is a feature rich offering that may well find favor.

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While I’m not quite ready to turn down the volume on my TV to hear Joe Schmo’s coverage of the Superbowl, a place for sports fans to post sports rants for later listening has promise. There’s already a vibrant community of sports bloggers covering news and even live blogging games. These same bloggers would probably love to easily make audio broadcasts like the best of them. YouCastr makes that easy.

With the entry of Yahoo into the live video category and Ustream acquisition rumors, there’s a lot of interest in the live format. YouCastr’s focus on sports strikes me as a good way to inject a sense of purpose and consistency missing from some lifecasting sites. When you go on Justin.tv, you don’t always know what you’re going to get, but YouCastr will always give you something sports related.

YouCastr was built over the past year by a team of four and is funded in the mid six figures by a team of angels.

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Ustream.tv

Ustream.tv is one of the first wave of live streaming service providers that includes companies such as Justin.tv, Blogtv and Mogulus. Ustream.tv has offered a complete package of streaming and post show videos, and has a strong reputation as a reliable provider of live shows and events. The company announced a deal January 29 to stream the Republican convention, and has also featured other events including shows with Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and Chuck Norris. Ustream.tv is also the home of major league live streamers including Chris Pirillo, and also scored a viral win with Walrus TV.

The acquisition, if true, does seem a little strange timing wise given Microsoft’s takeover offer for Yahoo, however Valleywag suggests it’s a pre-emptive pre-Series A deal that will allow Microsoft to showcase Silverlight to a broader audience.

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Given all the chaos this week surrounding Microsoft’s bid to take over Yahoo, it’s not surprising that a new Yahoo product launch wouldn’t have an abundance of exuberance attached to it. Still, the only word anyone got that Yahoo Live has gone live is a three word post on Bradley Horowitz’s blog: “Live is live” (Horowitz is head of the Technology Development Group at Yahoo).

Yahoo Live allows anyone with a webcam to stream live video of themselves to a dedicated site. They call it “a platform for live video.”

It is very similar to existing live streaming services like Stickam, Justin.tv and Ustream and Blogtv. Users create a channel, authorize their webcam and start broadcasting to the public. Other people can drop by and watch, or choose to participate via video, sound or text chat.

We’re still testing it, but for now the service is very unstable and keeps going down. It’s also clearly got a ways to go with features – videos are not archived for playback, for example, meaning once it’s broadcast live, that’s it.

Users can set up profiles for themselves and track how many people have watched them stream live, how many broadcasts they have made, and how long total they’ve been on the air. When you’re in a streaming session with others, up to five other people can be shown on your screen at the same time, one of which is the main presenter and four others who are simply in the session. Everyone else can be seen in a chat room associated with the session, and these sessions can also be embedded around the web.

Right now it looks as though Yahoo has hired two people – one of which is a girl who will sing songs on request – to help launch the site by providing some ongoing content. Yahoo has also set up a Twitter account that you can follow to see who’s streaming at a given time. Want to pull out information from Yahoo Live and access it elsewhere? There’s also an API available.

Update: Yahoo’s Chad Dickerson responds below in the comments about the stability issue.

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The new mobile site from BlogTV m.blogtv.com offers live streaming to most mobile phones without the need for a plugin (I’m presuming it’s flash based, because it doesn’t work on my iPhone.)

BlogTV claims that their mobile streaming services is the first of its type available for mobile phones. The mobile version includes the host stream, cohost and chat feed, fully replicating the normal BlogTV experience.

Mobile services such as this do rely on decent data plans that aren’t always available everywhere, but in the ongoing battle of live streaming supremacy, it’s another positive addition from BlogTV following their ICQ deal January 30.

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The initial stage of the deal will see BlogTV promoted to ICQ users through the ICQ website, and in return ICQ will become the preferred instant messaging platform on BlogTV. The second stage will see ICQ users being able to use their ICQ login details to access and use BlogTV, with any revenue generated from ICQ users using BlogTV to be split between the two companies.

The first market the deal will be rolled out to is Russia, which has 8 million active ICQ users. BlogTV will operate a Russian language site customized for local market conditions.

Last week, BlogTV celebrated its 100,000th user and has so far shown 50 million viewing minutes since it launched.

The arms race to become the dominant leader in the live streaming market continues. Ustream.tv beat competitors to become the exclusive internet streaming provider for the Republican National Convention yesterday, and others including Mogulus (the official streaming partner of the Crunchies) and Justin.tv have continued to explore every opportunity for maximum exposure. Blog.TV’s move into country specific sites in conjunction with ICQ is a positive step for the service, and I’d expect to see similar deals and country specific sites from the other major players as the year progresses.

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We just happened to discuss the topic of life streaming. I mentioned Robert Scoble live Twittering the birth of his son and how I believed that it was a step too far, that ultimately some things should remain private. It’s hard to describe her reaction in words, but the look of horror at the suggestion was something I’ll remember for years. She told me that life streaming should include everything, and that Scoble did the right thing.

On a related note I read Ben Elton’s latest novel Blind Faith on the way to the States, and it’s all about life streaming (note that it’s not available in the US until June). To quote Amazon on the book:

Imagine a world where everyone knows everything about everybody. Where what a person “feels” and “truly believes” is protected under the law, while what is rational, even provable is condemned as heresy. A world where to question ignorance and intolerance is to commit a Crime against Faith.

Imagine it. Or just wait until After The Flood.

On a hot Sagittarian morning in the year 56 ATF, Trafford Sewell struggles to work through the usual crowds of near-naked commuters. He is confronted by the intimidating figure of his Parish Confessor. Why has Trafford not been streaming his every moment of sexual intimacy onto the community website like everybody else? Does he think he’s different or special in some way? Better than his fellow man and woman? Does he have something to hide?

Ben Elton imagines a post-apocalyptic society where religious intolerance combines with a confessional sex-obsessed, self-centric culture to create a world where nakedness is modesty, ignorance is wisdom and privacy is a dangerous perversion. A chilling vision of what’s to come? Or something rather closer to what we call reality?

It’s a challenging book, perhaps in line with Keensian thinking (as in Andrew Keen). But intellectually it raises very good questions about privacy and where we draw the line on what we share online, and in those terms I’d highly recommend reading it.

I still believe that some things should remain private. I’ve embraced Twitter in a big way, and I constantly update it, but most of what goes on in my family life remains private. Blogging even more so, it’s not as immediate as Twitter anyway. A visit to Justin.tv in particular shows people streaming their lives 24/7 and while I can see some appeal in doing a show, the thought that my every move may be watched sickens me.

We can’t do a multi-stage survey using our voting plugin for WordPress, so I’ve split the options into age categories. My hunch is that younger people (Gen Y and the new Gen Z) are more open to complete life streaming than those in Gen X and older. There is a heavier level of cynicism amongst the younger generation, a cynicism that seems to dictate that live and unedited is ultimately the only truth as opposed to the heavily slanted, and edited main stream media.

Leave a comment or vote below, it will be interesting to see what others think. If you disagree with me so be it, Sarah Meyers proved to me that some people believe there isn’t a line.

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When they first launched, they considered existing using existing CDNs to run their network. Rates from one large CDN cost as much as $0.36 for every hour of video run. Justin.TV developed a system that does it for 3/4 of a penny. Their most recent iteration of the network does it for 1/4 of a penny. All those pennies add up, especially for a startup that broadcasts 24 hours a day.

But saving money by building your own network is not for everyone. Their current system has been over a year in the making and fairly elaborate. It consists of a load balancing system that can start streaming content over their own network of servers and push peak traffic to Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services. It’s taken so long because they’ve essentially had to pick apart and rebuild a flash server from the ground up to make this possible without using Adobe’s software.

And they expect all this hard work to pay off. Having control over the entire pipeline means they can add on new features, such as more easily archiving recorded videos or trans-coding them into other formats. No word on whether they’ll be lending the CND out to third parties any time soon, though.

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