Who is winning the race to become the top site for live Web video? A quick check on Google Trends for Websites and comScore suggests that over the past four months Justin.tv is pulling ahead of the pack. According to Google Trends, Justin.tv is attracting more than 300,000 unique visitors a day, compared to only about 60,000 for both Stickam.com and Ustream.tv. Comscore measures visitors on a monthly basis, but shows a similar relative breakdown, with Justin.tv pulling in 1.9 million monthly uniques worldwide versus 860,000 for Stickam, 790,000 for Ustream.tv, and 440,000 for Mogulus. (See chart below).

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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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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We’ve been following the evolving live streaming space for some time now. The success of recorded social video on the net (read YouTube acquisition) spurred on many more video startups, including a host of video sites hoping to find an equally large demand for live content. There are a bunch of them out there, including Ustream.tv, Stickam, Blogtv.com, Operator11, Mogulus, Veodia, and Justin.tv.

Justin.tv, the first mobile lifecasting site, remained closed over the past couple of months as they experimented with the model. Today they’ve finally opened the site to anyone and partnered with On2 technologies for improved video compression. The new codec is supposed to deliver superior performance that yields higher quality video on a lower quality connection. On2’s benchmarks say their codec has a 30% performance improvement over the Sorenson video codec (commonly used in Flash and Quicktime) and it looks like Justin.tv’s streams are benefiting from it.

So why the wait? Justin.tv originally started with a rather elaborate lifecasting model where anyone could stream their life on the go with a webcam and a laptop in their backpack. It did a great job of getting them a lot of press and into a great deal of mischief, but the hardware turned out to be too costly for the average user.

Since then, the model has switched into kind of a MySpace for video casters. The site features an Apple “coverflow-style” directory of all the casters and list of top clips. Each caster gets an individually-stylized channel page with their own live cast, chat room, profile, twitter, and top highlights. They’ve also started adding professional content, like a behind the scenes cast of “One Tree Hill”. Viewers play judge and jury of the video streams, voting content for the clips they like to the front page of the site and casters seem happy to play along.

As I’ve said before, I think the live streaming model has a lot of growing up to do before we see any stand out successes. There are several hurdles to mass consumption of the medium. User generated content is often not of the highest quality. Also, live streaming doesn’t lend itself to the same embeddable distribution model that made YouTube so successful since you don’t know what live content will show up (most sites have since tied in recorded video clips). Live streaming does shine when it comes to user interaction, which has led many startups to focus on shows and events. Ustream has embraced the tech community with a host of shows and event casts. While not “live” video, Kyte.tv’s community around recently-live video is another strategy. However, Stickam, which launched in 2005, also has a MySpace look and feel and appears to be flat yet leading the pack according to Compete and Alexa. We have yet to see whether an open Justin.tv will have more success with the model.

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Every parent’s worst irrational nightmare may finally have come true. According to report in the NY Times, popular live webcam streaming service Stickam is owned by pornographers.

The report claims that Stickam’s parent company Advanced Video Communications is owned by Wataru Takahashi, “a Japanese businessman who also owns and operates DTI Services, a vast network of Web sites offering live sex shows over Web cameras”. The report quotes former VP of Stickam Alex Becker alleging that Stickam shares office space, employees and computer systems with pornographic Web sites.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with owning a pornography business, but mixing that business with a service that has 600,000 users, many aged below 18, does raise some rather valid ethical and moral concerns. Would you let your child use Stickam knowing that it’s not only owned by a porn company, but allegedly is run by the very same folks, in the same office?

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The growth of Youtube and its subsequent $1.65 billion buyout left behind a bevy of competing video sites. Since then competitors have been seeking to differentiate themselves by focusing on longer videos, higher (bitrate) quality videos, professional content, and paying their users. However, one of the more unique approaches to differentiation has been streaming live video over the internet. If social live video gets big traction down the road, it’s most likely going to be led by one of these startups:

The oldest of the bunch, launching back in February of 2006, Stickam lets you host your own live show stream and chat on their site or embedded in your own. When your show isn’t live, you can show a pictures, audio, or recorded shows on a MySpace-like profile page. The front page of the site features the most recent show and their number of live viewers, which currently is floating around 3,000.Launched back in May, BlogTv also lets you start your own live show and chat. Every show you record is broadcasted live and then archived. You can subscribe to each show on your account, embed, rate, and recommend them. Live shows are shown on the front page, but you can also review the archived footage in their library. They just launched a new live embeddable player that lets you and a co-host stream a show with live chat directly from your blog.Yet to get out of private beta, Mogulus is focused on live video production tools. Using their tools, you can see how many viewers are waiting for your broadcast and storyboard the show you’re about to broadcast on your own Mogulus URL. With storyboarding, you can drop recorded videos into your feed at cue and even overlay graphics such as logos or titles. You can even collaborate with another producer and cooperatively shape the storyboard.The oddest of the bunch, Justin.tvlaunched with a splash and then again when police raided their apartment. The novelty of the site centered around one of the co-founders, Justin Kan, streaming his life 24/7 from a head cam. Justin.tv has yet to launch an open network, and has instead opted to expand slowly by adding a select number of dedicated “lifecasters”. Each caster gets a live feed, video archive, and chat channel. Instead of just featuring what’s live on the front page, they’ve also developed a “tips” service that lets users dig up key moments.Launched back in March, Ustream is another lifecasting network letting anyone plug in and start streaming, similar to Stickam. It’s caught on in the tech crowd with people like Robert Scoble and Chris Pirillo streaming their own shows from offices or on the road at conventions. Each caster gets a profile page where they can post their videos, photos, and thoughts. The player comes with live chat, the ability to archive footage, and embed it on your site. They feature the archived versions on their front page along with the live feeds.

Live flash video is a different animal than the recorded videos you see on all over Youtube. These sites require more accurate distribution networks because, like FedEx, their packages always have to arrive on time. Back in March, Youtube delivered over 1.1 billion streams to 53.5 million unique users. That’s an unheard of number for live video on the web. You can see a comparison of the above site’s traffic on Alexa here, but be warned that streaming sites don’t need to be refreshed to consume more content and therefore don’t generate as many pageviews as non streaming sites.

Live video also complicates the trend toward time shifted video. The serendipity of live video makes it engaging to watch, but at the same time hard to bubble interesting content to the top. Sites have reacted to the problem by archiving and rating the videos, or more interestingly, voting up individual clips.

One final problem is the accessibility of live video production for consumers. Anyone with any kind of camera can upload to one of the social video site, but with live video, producers have to be more committed if they’re going to produce quality content. To avoid the hum drum of being chained to a webcam, users have to either be very talented, or construct their own mobile cameras. Advancement in mobile phones may change that, but right now it’s a significant limitation.

Live video has one great strength, however, the ability to directly engage the audience, be they friends or admirers. This is why I think if we see tremendous success in live video casting, it will come from sites that focus on building a community around a few top new media stars that can captivate their audience and drive the bulk of the traffic to the site.

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Stickam will launch tomorrow, February 15. The service allows users to easily create video and audio files, and additional tools to easily post these files to a website with a code snippet.

The media files are played on the destination website in Flash. Bunchball has similar technology for integration of flash games into blogs and other websties.

Stickam is free, has no bandwidth restrictions and up to 500 mb of storage.

These are the kinds of tools that are already integrated quite nicely into sites like Tagworld. But if you are a more serious blogger and want to add just a bit of flair to your blog, Stickam may be for you.

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