Last week we reported on Shakira’s decision to use Ustream and Facebook to live stream the debut of her latest music video, Give It Up To Me — a move that’s a fairly huge departure from the standard MTV route we probably would have seen a few years ago. Ustream has just given us the stats of yesterday’s launch, and it’s clear that it drew quite a crowd: over the course of the ten minute live stream, Shakira’s video had 95,000 unique viewers during the initial broadcast. And over the course of the last 24 hours, the video has seen a total of over 500,000 views.

Ustream says that Shakira video wasn’t its most popular of all time — the streams for Michael Jackson’s memorial service and President Obama’s Inauguration saw much more traffic, with 4.6MM and 3.8MM total streams respectivly. But those streams were both hours long, while Shakira’s stream lasted a mere ten minutes. It’s also important to note that these viewers were likely more engaged than they would be if they were just staring at the tube.

International music star Shakira is taking a new approach to releasing her latest music video: she’s doing it through a live stream on Ustream, which will be emedded on her Facebook Page. According to Sony, this is the first time an artist has used the platform to debut a music video (Updated: Sony is wrong. Chamillionaire did it first, see below). Shakira (and her managers) are keen on the idea because it allows her and her fans to interact with each other in real time — something that’s not practical on TV, where these videos have been making their debuts for decades. The stream will start here on Monday at noon, PT.

The live video/Facebook combo is quickly gaining steam for artists looking to connect with their fans — we’ve recently seen the Foo Fighters stream a live concert using LiveStream, and earlier this week Jason Mraz held a couple live chat session with fans as well. Other sites that have also recently streamed live concerts include MySpace, YouTube, and Hulu.

Ustream has just started to roll out a new feature for its live video streams that allows commenters to syndicate their thoughts across four of the web’s largest social sites: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and AIM instant messenger. The feature will go live for Featured shows beginning on Monday, and everyone else will have access soon thereafter.

The feature is similar to what Facebook has offered for its video broadcasts (like the one it had for President Obama’s inauguration), where users are invited to update their statuses in real-time as they watch a video. Except with Ustream’s comments, users will be able to check off boxes at the top of the chat window to choose if they’d like to broadcast their updates across multiple services. Each update from the Ustream ‘Social Stream’ box will also include a link to the video you’re watching, which means that the feature can help videos go viral quickly.

The United Nations has collaborated with Skype, Facebook, and Ustream to give users worldwide a greater degree of exposure and access to celebrities and politicians taking part in the Stand Up Take Action! movement to end poverty. This week key figures including former Irish President Mary Robinson and African entertainers Femi Kuti, Angelique Kidjo and Yvonne Chakachaka, will be taking part in Skype video chats that Ustream will be broadcasting through the Millenium Campaign’s Facebook Page and Ustream channel. The calls will also include Facebook’s Live Stream widget.

Earlier this summer live video streaming service Ustream scored a big win as it was endorsed by Facebook as its preferred live video service. The app gives celebrities and brands a way to create their own live streams without having to build custom Live Stream Box applications, which also launched in June. Ustream on Facebook is only available to brands and celebrities at this point (you have to apply to the program if you want it), but it’s already seeing some impressive stats — to date, the app has seen nearly 4 million total viewers and more than 6 million hours streamed.

The app’s growing roster of celebrity users includes Miley Cyrus, CBS Mountain Dew, The Jonas Brothers, Ashton Kutcher, Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, Honors Society, Ashley Tisdale, Reba McEntire, Diddy’s White Party, Hurley Pro and U.S. Open surfing competitions, Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong Global Summit, as well as a number of other live concerts and even Duke University’s office hours. Facebook executives have used the app as well, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg streaming from Brazil during a talk and COO Sheryl Sandberg using it for her Advertising Week keynote.

Tonight, Google’s Android platform is getting another application that gives it functionality iPhone users can only gaze at longingly. This time, it’s Ustream, a mobile streaming application that lets you broadcast video directly from your phone. The application will be available on the Android Market by 9 AM PST tomorrow morning.

Ustream isn’t the only option available for streaming video on Android — Qik launched its own version in June. But it’s a very solid debut that comes with some features that Qik doesn’t. CEO John Ham says that one key differentiator for the new Ustream app is the way it handles latency. While competitors can build up a ‘lag time’ over the course of an extended broadcast, Ham says that Ustream uses a low latency connection and optimization both client and server side to keep this to a minimum — in other words, the lag doesn’t build up. In my testing I got a lag time of around three seconds over a 3G connection (nothing to scoff at), and perhaps more importantly the delay didn’t grow over time, which is especially important if you’re going to interact with your viewers through the app’s various community features.

Live video streaming service Ustream is being sued by Square Ring, Inc, a boxing promotional company owned by professional boxer Roy Jones, Jr. The suit alleges that Ustream has committed “massive and blatant copyright infringement” by allowing 2,377 users to view a broadcast of the fight Roy Jones Jr. vs Omar Sheika free of charge. Furthermore, the suit says that Ustream has ignored repeated requests by Square Ring Inc. to gather more information about the infringement. From the suit:

Following the illegal exhibition of Plaintiff’s Copyrighted Broadcast on USTREAM’s website on March 21, 2009, notifying Defendants of the copyright and trademark infringements and, in a good faith effort to avoid litigation, requested information pursuant to Rules 26 and 34 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

For several months now, Ustream has had an iPhone app that allows you to view video from the service. But “view” is the keyword there. You could only watch it, you could not record and send your own video back from the iPhone. But starting today, you finally can.

The new Ustream Recorder is a free application available in Apple’s App Store that allows you to send video from your iPhone to the web. Unfortunately, despite long-standing talk that it might be able to send live video from your iPhone to the web, that is not the case. Instead, Ustream appears to be attempting to use some spin by calling it a “live-to-recorded video recorder” — um, okay, isn’t all video at some point technically recorded live? Yes, it is.

Mentioning “live” was not necessary here because this app does not stream video live. Not that it’s Ustream’s fault, it’s Apple that doesn’t currently allow apps that do that in the App Store. So instead, this app records video and then uploads it to the web. The problem is that there are already a number of other apps out there that do this, like Kyte and 12cast. But Ustream wants to challenge them on the iPhone by offering more options.

“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.” That’s what Justin.tv VP of Marketing Evan Solomon tells us in announcing the opening up of the service’s API.

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.

There’s a lot of live video streaming competition out there right now, but Justin.tv remains the biggest. And it’s looking to hold that lead with a redesign launching today, along with some new features.

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.

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.