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. By integrating Ustream into Facebook, Shakira was likely able to gain quite a few new Fans on her Facebook account, which means she’s established a long term way to reach out to them.

It’s worth pointing out that Shakira was’t the first artist to stream her video — that title appears to be held by Chamillionaire who debuted his video for Good Morning a few days prior. Given Shakira’s success don’t be surprised if more artists start following suit.

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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.

Update: Looks like Sony was wrong. As our commenters point out, Chamillionaire was the first to use Ustream for the debut of his music video, Good Morning (which you can watch here). As we saw at TechCrunch50 he’s definitely ahead of the curve with regard to web services, so it’s no surprise that he was first.

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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.

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Each Skype call will take place this week in the buildup to the Stand Up events that will take place around the world this weekend as citizens urge their governments to strive to reach the Millennium Development Goals.

The Millennium campaign looks to help the world reach the eight Millennium Development Goals developed by the United Nations in 2000, with the target of having each of them fulfilled by 2015. The goals focus on ending poverty and the root causes behind it, as well as furthering education, promoting gender equality, reducing child mortality, improving health care and more (you can see the full list here).

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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.

To be clear, Facebook and Ustream don’t have a financial relationship — rather, Facebook has chosen Ustream as its “preferred provider for live streaming video on Facebook”. Facebook was involved in helping develop the application and its initial testing during some massively popular Jonas Brothers events, and has previously recomended it in its blog posts.

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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.

And there are plenty of those: the application allows you to poll your views live during the broadcast, and also supports both Ustream’s integrated chat and Twitter chat. It also supports local recording, which lets you take higher quality video for upload later.

Another great feature: Ustream for Android lets you ‘overtake’ a currently broadcasting stream, provided you’re the owner of the account. For example, we could use the mobile application to take over our CrunchCam stream while we’re on the go and have some breaking news. Then, when we finished our mobile broadcast, the feed would revert to the camera that’s constantly streaming from inside TechCrunch headquarters (you can see a demo in the video below). Very slick.

Ustream also offers some apps for the iPhone, but these don’t let you broadcast straight to the web because Apple has restricted this functionality, despite the fact that the 3GS actually supports video.

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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. Plaintiff’s letter further advised Defendants that, to Plaintiff’s knowledge, they permitted approximately 2,377 users to view Plaintiff’s pay-per-view program completely free of charge, in violation of Plaintiff’s rights. To date, Defendants have neither complied with Plaintiff’s request nor responded to Plaintiff’s letter…

The court document, embedded below, also details Square Ring’s attempts to proactively prevent the event from being pirated. According to the suit, Square Ring sent Ustream four notices in the week leading up to the fight, asking that the service either provide a ‘take down tool’, or that it have staff actively monitor and delete any streams of the fight. The document says that while some other sites did provide take-down tools, Ustream did not cooperate.

Ustream has given us the following statement regarding the suit:

Ustream is serious about complying with the copyright laws and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and we’re aggressively taking short- and long-term steps to work with the content industry to meet their needs. We believe the Square Ring lawsuit does not have merit and that we’re fully protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Safe Harbor provisions.

Piracy is a problem that has long plagued live video sites like Ustream and its competitors, which include Justin.tv. Because content is being streamed by users, it can be difficult for the services to monitor and prevent copyrighted material from being streamed. But while they’d never admit it, piracy can also help these sites establish sizable user bases — one need only look to YouTube for proof, which was a hotbed for pirated material in its early days and was later acquired by Google for $1.65 billion.

Ustream Sued by Square Ring Productions –

Image via Wikimedia

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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.

The app gives you the option to share you videos to Ustream, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook or Ustream on Facebook. This makes the app much more flexible than its competitors when it comes to deciding where you want to send your video. Ustream also promises high-quality video from the app, which isn’t a surprise given the quality that Kyte’s app outputs.

Also interesting is that the app allows edit and manage videos that are already up on Ustream, even if they weren’t recorded with the iPhone. You simply pull download them to edit them.

But the reason why Ustream isn’t too bummed about its app not offering live-streaming is that they envisioned it used in another way, with another new service they’re launching.

Called “Media Stream,” it’s a functionality that basically allows broadcasters to pull in other video clips to supplement their own streams. Imagine it this way: Say you’re watching the CrunchCam, but one of the TechCrunch reporters has just shot a cool video and uploaded it. Assuming they had the correct privileges, that video would then show up as a thumbnail below the live feed. And if a user clicked on it, they could watch it.

Again, that is pre-recorded video being sent in from the iPhone, but such a use-case actually sounds pretty cool. And for publishers it’s fairly flexible. You can accept videos from anyone that submits them if they use a hashtag that you set (to be able to identify the right videos). You can then choose to accept certain videos into your feed on a case-by-case basis. Or you can approve certain users ahead of time so that their videos will definitely show up in your stream.

The functionality works on Ustream and on embeds.

It’s disappointing that the app doesn’t offer live video streaming, but again, that’s not Ustream’s fault (Qik can only do it by bypassing the App Store with an Ad-Hoc install method). But a nice set up upload options and this new Media Stream capability should make Ustream’s app a good option in an increasingly crowded iPhone 3GS video app field.

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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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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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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.

Apparently, how this will work is that on Facebook Pages there will now be a way to add a “Live” tab, which will house things such as the Ustream on Facebook feature. Previously, beyond the Jonas Brothers, Facebook has tested this with CNN and the NBA All-Star game. Here’s what Facebook has to say:

Today, Facebook is launching the Facebook Live Stream Box as a feature that any website owner or developer can use to enable Facebook users to connect, share, and post updates in real-time as they witness an event online. Websites can run the Live Stream Box next to live streaming videos of concerts, speeches, sporting events, webcasts, TV shows, presentations, or webinars. Sites can also run the Live Stream Box in multi-player games, or with any other experience where many people are visiting a website at the same time.

But Ustream’s funtionality is not for everyone yet, due to what will undoubtedly be high demand, we’re told. Any artist or person who thinks they could benefit from the Ustream functionality, can apply to have the feature turned on here. With it, you’ll get not only the live player, but a customizable banner that can link to places like iTunes or Amazon (obviously important for artists).

Right now, there are two versions of the player: A free ad-supported version, and a white-label version. The free version is the one with limited sign-ups allowed right now, so click that link above quickly if you think you need the feature. The white-label version comes with a one-time development fee of $15,000. But you also get an ongoing subscription to Ustream’s white-label platform, Watershed.

Find out more information here. Eventually, Ustream hopes to port this Facebook experience over to its main site as well using Facebook Connect, we’re told.

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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).

And a bigger draw of StreamAPI may be that you can set it up without an expert Flash developer. The service offers a drag and drop editor that is very simple to use. Stickam CEO Steven Fruchter walked me through the process of making your own video streaming area — it took just about a minute to have everything in place and ready to go.

“We’re trying to power all live video on the internet,” Fruchter told me. And at such low prices and with a service that’s easy to use, StreamAPI is certainly a compelling offering. Stickam launched in February of 2006, before all of its big rivals, but today it’s often overshadowed by many of them. This new API is its attempt to level the playing field by providing an invaluable service to a lot of smaller startups.

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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.

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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.

Of course, content is still king. Kutcher and partner Jason Goldberg’s web cartoon show Blah Girls, hasn’t exactly exploded onto the scene after being unveiled at last year’s TC50. Traffic to the Blah Girl’s site does seem to be increasing nicely now, but it was in a rut for a while — and pales in comparison to say, the amount of pageviews Kutcher’s Twitter profile did just last week. And to be fair, Blah Girls is syndicated a bunch of different places, so website traffic doesn’t mean all that much for the show.

But Ustream knows a bit about huge viral shows itself. It hosts the Shiba Inu Puppy Cam, which is literally just a live stream of a puffy puppies sitting there being cute. That video has attracted some 10 million viewers, according to Ustream. And Ustream also did some major streaming during President Obama’s inauguration in January.

On top of their web partnership, the two sides plan to bring their videos to the iPhone in May, with a new live streaming aggregator app, taking all of these Punk’d-style live videos mobile.

As I said, it sounds like a winning combo, but I would caution Kutcher and company of one thing: There is still backlash on the web. If you overexpose yourself too much, users can get turned off, just as viewers do in Hollywood. Stay focused on what works, but don’t try to do too much. And please follow up on your promise to punk Ted Turner.

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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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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.

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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.

Ustream wants to bring its large audience for live streaming videos on the Web (it claims 15 million monthly uniques across both its site and embedded players) over to mobile phones. In the mobile video streaming race, it is fighting for position with Qik and Kyte (their official iPhone apps don’t allow for broadcasting yet either, although Qik has one for jailbroken iPhones). But this is a battle for the hearts and minds of tomorrows mobile video streamers. Taking a page from Kyte, Ustream is getting celebrities and rappers like Lil Wayne to broadcast using Ustream.

Below is a promo video showing UStream’s new mobile app on an iPhone:

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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.

Dorsey is the third outsider to join Ustream’s Advisory Board, after General Wesley Clark and Former Head of Monetization at YouTube Shashi Seth. The company has raised over $13 million to date but faces stiff competition from similar services like Stickam, Kyte, Justin.TV and Mogulus (to name but a few), so it can use all the advice it gets.

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

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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.

We’re still waiting on Ustream’s second application that would allow users to actually broadcast video (the viewing app only lets you stream). While competitors like Qik and Flixwagon have created similar apps that work on jailbroken iPhones, none of these have made their way to the App Store. Ustream’s application was submitted last week and has not yet been approved by Apple.

Update: This post originally said that Ustream saw 113,000 downloads in 48 hours. While it has been around 48 hours since the application launched, Ustream says that the download figure hasn’t been updated to include today’s downloads, so it really only represents the first day that the app was available on the store.

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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.

When it comes to big live events with millions of people watching at the same time, traditional TV broadcasters have nothing to worry about. Right now, the Internet breaks at about one million simultaneous streams. That is nothing when it comes to the audience size for historic events, or even a big football game. The Internet simply does not shine when it is used as a broadcast medium. And yesterday proved it.

Will it get better? Yes. Akamai and others can always put up more proxy streaming servers at the edge of the network to meet demand. But that is an expensive proposition for infrequent events. Perhaps a better solution for live streaming is a peer-to-peer model where streaming quality improves as more people watch. (Check out RayV, which does this). That would require everyone to download extra add-on software for their browsers. I’d do it in a second if that would solve the live stream stuttering problem.

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…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.

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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 (ABC.com, CBS.com, MSNBC.com, Fox.com, CNN.com, NYTimes.com, WashingtonPost.com, etc) 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.

Where To Watch

There will be plenty of livestreams of the Inauguration at all the media sites mentioned above. Some of the sites offering livestreams include:

—Hulu: Will be streaming live, Fox.com will also be using Hulu’s stream.
—C-Span: Washington D.C.’s video standby will have four live feeds to choose from.
—CNN.com: Partnering with Facebook so you can see your friends’ status updates while watching.
—Current TV : Will add a Twitterstream to its coverage.
—Ustream.tv: This stream will also be available on your iPhone, great for those along the parade route too far away to see the main stage.
—Starbucks and movie theaters: For those who cannot make it to Washington, MSNBC is hosting screenings of the inauguration in movie theaters and Starbucks across the country (although it looks as though these are already sold out).
— Joost is also broadcasting the inauguration live.
—Obama Girl is streaming her coverage on Stickam.
— Kyte.tv has a special inauguration channel as well

Where To Stay

—CrashTheInauguration: If you are going to Washington, D.C. and still don’t have a room, you might find a couch to sleep on at CrashTheInauguration. And if you are lucky they might even serve you Obama O’s for breakfast.

Where To Share

—Twitter: Just search for “inauguration” or “Obama”. The chatter has already started.

— Check out Obama’s Inauguration blog on Tumblr at http://inauguration.tumblr.com/

—Flickr pool for Inauguration 2009.

—Users can get Twitter, Flickr, Change.gov, and YouTube updates to follow only the most interesting pictures, video, posts, and tweets about the election through Dipity.

—NPR Inauguration Report: Run by NPR’s social media desk, it will be collecting dispatches from spectators via Twitter, Flicr, YouTube, and text message. All Tweets or text messages that start with “#inaug09″ or “#dctrip09″ will be included in NPR’s feed, as well as Flickr photos and YouTube videos tagged “inaug09″ or “dctrip09.” There are also an accompanying iPhone and Android apps called IR09, Inauguration Report 2009 (more details here).

—CNN/Microsoft 3D Photosynth: People at the inauguration can upload their photos and Microosft will combine them into a 3D panoramic Photosynth (more details here).

—Citizen’s Briefing Book: Got a policy suggestion for the transition team? Submit one or vote for the best ones at Change.gov

—Where Were You?: A video contest sponsored by Memelabs that will let people share where they were on this historic day.

iPhone Apps and Follow-up

—Ustream.tv: Stream the inauguration to your iPhone (see above).

—Inauguration Report 2009: Submit your own report to NPR with text, photos, or audio. Reports post straight to NPR’s Inauguration feed (see above).

—PointAbout 2009 Presidential Inauguration Guide: Free app with a countdown to the inauguration, distance to the inauguration steps, and lets you navigate Washington, D.C. with maps of public transport, parking, free WiFi zones, and a Zagat’s restaurant guide for the city.

—CrashTheInauguration (same as above, but on your iPhone).

—Change (U.S.) Politics (iTunes link). Cast your approval rating of the Obama administration across 14 issues

—PolitFact’s Obameter: Obama made more than 500 promises during the election campaign. Track how many he keeps with the Obameter.

Know of more resources? Add them in comments.
(Photo by Anna Levinzon).

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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:

Note that this is a different application than we wrote about yesterday. Yesterday’s application allows people to watch Ustream videos on their iPhone (which is also really cool). This app lets people broadcast live video from their iPhone to the Internet.

The application is currently pending approval from Apple, and Ustream isn’t saying much about when that might be. But stay tuned, hopefully this is coming very soon.

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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.

If you’d like to try out the application before it officially launches, we have a handful of invitations to give away. Just follow the directions below.

Instructions for preview:

1) Plug the iPhone into your computer
2) Wait for the iPhone info to appear in iTunes
3) click on the words “Serial Number” to cause it to change to “Identifier”
4) double-click the identifier number (the long string of characters) and then press cmd-C (Mac) or ctrl-C (Windows) to copy it
5) email that identifier to iphone@ustream.tv so we can build a custom version for that phone using the iPhone SDK

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