Today, Facebook is launching a new “Live Stream Box” feature which allows for Facebook Pages to offer their own live video and chat area. And Ustream will be the first to take advantage of it with Ustream on Facebook, a new service to provide live video support to select Facebook users.

This functionality is an extension of what Ustream and Facebook did with some Jonas Brothers concerts last month — events which drew huge numbers. How huge? This huge, according to Ustream:

• 1.5 million unique posts were made via Facebook Live Feed
• 23K average posts per minute
• More than 100K users joined the webcast after seeing their friend’s comment on Facebook
• 974K total unique viewers watched the one hour webcast
• Ustream reports the Jonas Brothers webcast on Facebook surpassed the largest live video event they have hosted for any music artist

So clearly, there’s a big demand for certain live events via Facebook, and Ustream is jumping on it, as Facebook’s preferred partner.

A lot of people don’t realize just how costly and bandwidth intensive streaming live video on the web is from a back-end perspective. There’s a reason YouTube hasn’t launched a live service and Yahoo had to shut its down. Most end users never have to deal with such concerns because they use a service like Ustream, Justin.tv or Stickam to handle their needs on a small level. But what if you have a startup or a company that wants live streaming to be a key part of your business? Then you may want to check out Stickam’s new StreamAPI.

StreamAPI is the white label version of a service Stickam’s been offering to several larger companies for a while now. While most startups probably won’t need to scale as big as an MTV-sized audience, there is still a need to have the appropriate resources to stream live to a large audience. StreamAPI can handle that while giving clients an easy to use, customizable interface and very low per-viewer hour stream rates. How low? Well, while Ustream may charge up to $1 per view hour, with StreamAPI, Stickam is willing to go as low as $0.05 per view hour (depending on quality).

Most of you know that, following a somewhat firm request by the city of Atherton, we finally moved TechCrunch out of my house and into a great new office in the heart of downtown Palo Alto.

A few of you have been kind enough to stop by and visit and see us at work. But for those of you who haven’t stopped by, you can now see what we’re up to 24/7, thanks to Ustream. The TechCrunch cam is now up and running (or crunchcam), strategically placed at an angle to show as much of the office as possible. We’ll leave this on as often as we can, and it will double as a security camera at night. Please be patient if it goes down from time to time today, our tech team is busy duct taping the camera to an Ikea lamp that we’re using as a tripod. First class all the way here at TechCrunch.

We may install a second camera with a directional microphone to allow some limited audio. Stay tuned.

“Punked” is one of those words that started out as a slang term, but was taken to a whole new level by a pop culture moment — in this case, the MTV show Punk’d. But as quickly as it heated up in 2003, it quickly burned out, lasting just 4 years. But the company behind it, Ashton Kutcher’s Katalyst Media, may have found a way to revive the formula — take it live and online.

Katalyst is teaming up with Ustream, the online streaming video service, to bring “Punk’d-style experiences” to the platform. It would seem to have all the makings of a new web hit: People getting tricked and embarrassed on video, the whole thing happening live, interactivity and, perhaps most importantly to get it off the ground, star power. As we saw this past week with Kutcher’s race to a million Twitter followers, the guy knows how to leverage himself on the web.

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.

Come chat with me on Ustream on my Virgin America flight and watch people walk by! I’ll be turning on my camera every hour or so and I’ll be chatting live from 35,000 feet.

I’ll also be IMing with Virgin America’s IFE engineer James Weatherson around 6PM PT today and I’ll post a transcript. He’s in charge of the Red entertainment system on-board all VA flights and we’ll find out what we can expect to see from the in-flight entertainment system this year.

If you have any questions you’d like me to ask him, feel free to leave a comment.

Update: We’re streaming live for the rest of the flight. Come join the conversation.

Update 2: James wasn’t able to join us, so we’re going off the air. We’ll update if he manages to get online. Otherwise, we’ll have an in-person interview later this week.

Ustream, a live streaming video service based in Mountain View California, has laid off 4 people, or about 10% of staff, we’ve confirmed. At least two of the four staff let go were Director level or higher.

The downsizing has been added to the Layoff Tracker, which has tracked over 300,000 layoffs since last year.

Ustream has been in the news a lot lately and continues to innovate on the iPhone. The company has raised $13.1 million over two round of financing. The most recent round was a year ago, in April 2008.

Live video startup Ustream is making a big push into mobile. Today it is launching a mobile business division, as well as a new set of mobile video broadcasting apps (which can be found here, after login). Right now, the apps work on a wide variety of Nokia phones, including the N95, and on the iPhone, but only jailbroken ones. Alas, the company is still waiting for approval from Apple to release the app through iTunes. Meanwhile, its view-only iPhone app for watching live video streams is approaching one million downloads.

The broadcasting app, however, is what we are excited about. It includes integrated chat, audience polling, and GPS mapping. The polling lets broadcasters ask their audience what they want to see or what actions they should take in a live broadcast situation. Another key feature: mobile video broadcasters can send out a message via Twitter or Facebook to their audience to tell them when they are about to start streaming live. (See video below). Under the hood, Ustream has developed its own low-latency streaming technology which reduces the amount of transcoding that needs to be done on the server as well as the amount of buffering that needs to be done on the phone.

Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey is stepping in as an advisor to Ustream.tv, the popular live video community site. By now, you will / should have read about how Twitter came to be and how vital the role of Dorsey was to the whole story, essentially laying the groundworks for the real-time updating service we’ve all come to love (or not understand).

This history prompts Ustream.tv’s co-founder and CEO John Ham to state that “Jack has changed the internet forever”, which is a little over the top but no doubt his experience with real-time culture and the pains of scaling rapidly growing internet services will be a big help to the Mountain View, CA-based startup.

Update: Twitter needs some advice too. The service is currently down for the count as from around 11:19 AM CET (aaah, memories).

Only two days after its release, Ustream’s iPhone Viewing Application has already hit the top spot of the App Store’s Entertainment section, and is ranked the 6th most popular free application overall. Ustream says that its latest figure for number of downloads stands at a whopping 113,000, which only represents the first 24 hours that the application was available (Apple doesn’t update download counts in real time). The application allows users to watch live and archived streams from Ustream.tv directly on their iPhone or iPod Touch, and also features an integrated chat.

Despite its popularity, it looks like users have had a number of gripes. With an average rating of two stars, many of the app’s user reviews complain about crashing, the lack of support for 3G or Edge (you need to use Wi-Fi), and little in the way of mainstream television content. These issues aside, the application is still very cool, and will only get better as the developers push out updates.

Yesterday was supposed to be the day that live Web video streaming took on TV broadcasting. CNN.com alone served a record 21.3 million streams, with a peak of 1.3 million simultaneous streams. And Akamai reported a peak of 5.4 million simultaneous visitors per minute to the various news sites for which it hosts video, and more than 7 million simultaneous streams.

With millions tuning in from their PCs to watch President Obama’s Inauguration speech, it was one of the biggest tests yet for live video streaming. But live streaming failed. CNN.com kept bumping viewers into virtual waiting rooms. This happened to me in the middle of Obama’s speech. I had to keep hitting refresh, but missed half the speech. The stream on Hulu was even worse, with the video frozen and the audio coming in and out. And forget about Ustream. I couldn’t even get any audio. This seemed to be the general experience out there, based on other reports.

Ustream has received approval from Apple for its iPhone live video viewing application just in time to watch the Obama inauguration live from wherever you are.

…as long as you have a wifi connection that is. The application requires an open wifi connection to show video, but it works very well. Audio is solid, picture quality is good but with a low frame rate. And users can both read and leave comments in the chat stream. Get it here (iTunes link).

We eagerly await the fraternal twin Ustream app that will let users broadcast their own video from the device as well.

Whether you are headed to Washington for the Obama Inauguration or simply want to follow along online, there is no shortage of sites and applications dedicated to the national party on Tuesday, January 20. Of course, every major news site will have videos, photos, and reporting from the event. But the people lining the parade route will also be Twittering, uploading photos, and capturing video moments with their cell phones and video cameras. General information about the inauguration can be found at the sites for the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies and Presidential Inaugural Committee.

Below is the TechCrunch Guide to the Inauguration, a collection of links and apps that will help you make the most out of the inauguration.

Ustream is anticipating Apple’s approval of the first non-jailbroken iPhone application that will let users record and broadcast live video from the device. Last month MobileCrunch obtained a picture of the application running on a test phone. Yesterday, co-founder John Ham demo’d the product for me here at TechCrunch - see the video below.

The application lets users broadcast live video from the phone, as well as read and participate in user comments.

Competitor Qik has had a similar application running on hacked phones since August 2008 (also here). Flixwagon has a similar application for jailbroken iPhones. But no one has gotten one through Apple’s approval process.

Here’s the video:

John Ham, the cofounder and CEO of live video streaming site Ustream, stopped by this afternoon to show me their newest stuff - a yet-to-be-released application that lets users watch live streams from the service on their iPhone. I took a brief video of the product and embedded it below, along with the more official video from Ustream.

The application will let users watch any Ustream channel, live, directly from their iPhone. And not only that, users will also see and be able to participate in the live chat around the video as well.

The timing on the application is near perfect with the Obama inauguration coming up on January 20. If you have the application installed you’ll be able to watch it live from anywhere, even if you aren’t in front of your TV or computer.

The world is changing before our eyes.

Speculation was rampant the last few weeks that Google had to rely on a third party content delivery network to make the YouTube Live live concert stream properly at scale. Despite the fact that Google has it’s own quite impressive CDN, streaming live video (as opposed to progressive downloads, which YouTube has historically relied on) is hard stuff. And expensive - you have to license Adobe’s Flash Media Server, or a competitor like Wowza, and pay at least a couple of cents per gigabyte transferred on top of normal costs.

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.

A camera + the Internet + puppies. Ten thousand people are watching right now.

My goal is to get people to stop emailing me this. Ok? It’s awesome. I posted. Time has all the details, if you want to know their names, etc.

Thanks to reader tips we’ve had a chance to see IMVU’s racey new animated banner ads showing two women kissing as they fall downwards horizontally. The ad includes the message “live the lifestyle you’ve always dreamed of.” I signed up immediately.

The ad was spotted on Ustream, which prohibits content that is obscene or includes “pornography, erotica, child pornography or child erotica.” As far as I’m concerned this ad is none of that, but the Prop 8 supporters may disagree.

Watch the animated version:

Ustream is broadcasting the Republican National Convention live (as I type) and Google has embedded its coverage into the Elections section of Google News.

Why is this news? Because apparently this is the first time Google has embedded a non-Google service into one of its core pages. At least, that’s what Ustream is telling us and we have no evidence with which to disagree.

You can watch the full live coverage below.