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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Beginning at 1:15 PST (in about five minutes), Ustream will give eight iPhone app developers a chance to demo their apps in a live broadcast. Ustream is a live video broadcasting site that launched in March 2007 and has been compared to justin.tv.
Apple’s App Store offers a brief synopsis and screenshots of each of its 552 offered apps through iTunes, but it’s hard to get a feel for all of the features each one has to offer. These video demos should help give us a better idea of what each one can do, and hopefully a peek at what is planned in the future.
Very few would argue with the statement that video is hot right now. From the cultural phenomenon of YouTube, through to the rise of live streaming services, money is pouring into startups from content creators through to service providers. Getting into video isn’t as easy as setting up a blog, so here’s some advice of which direction to head in.
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 occasionalcontent 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.
Ustream.TV has taken $11.1 million Series A in a round that included Doll Capital Management and existing investor The Band of Angels.
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.”
It’s been a whole year since the launch of live video streaming site Justin.TV , and there is no shortage of competitors (Ustream, BlogTV, Kyte, Stickam, Mogulus, Yahoo Live, LiveVideo). (See more of our coverage here). But Justin.TV looks like it is holding its own in this still-nascent part of the Web. “So far,,” notes CEO Michael Seibel, “Justin.tv has more than 50 years of video stored in its archives and we have accumulated 10 of those years over the past 30 days.”
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):
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.
LiveVideo.com from MySpace founder Brad Greenspan’s company LiveUniverse is yet another live streaming service, but it combines the best of existing services with Yahoo Live style functionality for a package worth looking at.
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.
Ustream.tv is said to be in advanced talks with Microsoft to be acquired for $50 million, according to a report from Valleywag. Given it’s very early morning as the post goes live we are unable to put calls in to confirm the deal, but might have more later.
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.
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.
For those of you without C-SPAN, the Republican National Convention will be streamed live over the Web, and Ustream.TV has been chosen to be the official provider of live video streaming technology. (No doubt, other live streaming services such as Justin.TV,, Blog.tv, or Mogulus will be used by journalists and bloggers covering the event as well). The announcement is being made right now on Ustream.TV
Live streaming over the Web is a good way for the political parties to broadcast their message straight to the voters without any of that messy press commentary. But political bloggers should love this. Come September, they will be able to watch the Republican Convention from the comfort of their own homes, without having to swivel around to turn on their TVs. In addition to all the speechifying, Ustream.TV will also be used to set up live interviews and Web video chats between Republican officials and bloggers/journalists covering the event remotely. The video from the convention will be archived and available for bloggers and media outlets to repost to their own Websites.
If there was one defining breakthrough in 2007 as opposed to the year before, it was live video. From Justin.tv through to the gauntlet of clones live video made its presence felt, even if it’s not dominate today.
Ustream.tv remains one of my favorite services. It doesn’t have the cool tech Kyte has, or perhaps the wider presence of Justin.tv, but it’s reliable, and it usually delivers. I regularly tune in to Chris Pirillo live, it’s an informative program where you learn stuff as well. Today (my time) I spent some time listening to The Drill Down, where I ended up getting exclusive news of the Digg girl and a possible record contract; it was a good example of where Podcasting meets live TV, a positive from the new wave of live content.
And then there was Jim Choma. I just happened to be on Ustream after the Drill Down podcast and saw him live, and that’s where the fun began. Jim runs sites including Zipperfish.com, he also hosts a live show on Ustream under the name of “The Walrus.” Jim likes a drink, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we don’t normally stream the experience, complete with homophobia, swearing and nakedness. Once I Twittered the link his drinking session went from 30 viewers to over 100, and it went down hill from there, complete with a call in from me (the show is focused on live call ins) asking him how much he had to drink. Some short video I caught above and below. It was train wreck TV at its worst or perhaps best, but we were all compelled to watch it. If Jim had any career before it must surely join the deadpool now, or maybe not, after all drunk TV had some value tonight, at least from me and 100 others. Either way if the full Ustream clip gets released I’m betting this might well be the last great viral video of 2007.
What does General Wesley Clark know about live Web video? Apparently enough to land him a seat on Ustream.TV’s board of advisors. Or maybe they just liked his shiny medals. The company also announced a funding round today from Band of Angels and Western Technology Investors, which specializes in debt financing for startups. The amount was not disclosed.
Ustream.TV is a site for live Web video broadcasting that launched last March. It claims 115,000 people have used the service, “broadcasting one million unique viewer hours per month,” whatever that means. (How do you broadcast a “unique viewer hour”?) Anyway, that comes to about 5,000 hours of video a day, attracting a few hundred thousand viewers. Most of the broadcasters are regular consumers, but the site has also been used by presidential candidates, and the Plain White Ts rock band to broadcast a live concert that was watched by 150,000 fans online.
After speculation from last week, Sequoia backed Meebo launches Meebo Platform this evening, allowing third party developers to create applications for the Meebo web chat service. They’re celebrating the launch with a big party in San Francisco with hundreds of the company’s closest friends.
Like Facebook Platform and the recently announced MySpace Platform it consists of a set of APIs to give developers access certain user features and information. Developers will be able to include Flash applets and Javascript snippets within the applications.
Unlike MySpace and Facebook, however, the platform is not open to all who choose to come. The company is announcing four partners this evening and opening up a sandbox area for developers to build potential applications. Those that Meebo thinks will make the user experience richer, will be permitted to launch.
Meebo Platform will allow developers to monetize their applications, but it’s not open. Meebo will sell ads into the applications directly and split revenue 50/50 with the application developers.
Four partners are being announced this evening along with the launch. All are communication based: Tokbox (video chat), Talkshoe (conference calls on the fly), Ustream (lifecasting) and Pudding Media (PC to PC VOIP calls).
Games and other types of applications will come next. Basically, any type of application that can benefit from having either instant access to friends who are online right then and/or the need to communicate with them via instant messaging, would do well on the platform. With the communications partners, they simply use the friends list and presence indicator to help start a voice or video communication on the third party platform. For gaming and other applications, it may simply embed a game within a chat environment, allowing players to communicate real time with each other.
Meebo will also be hosting an open-door developer day on November 22 in their Silicon Valley offices. Developers can show up, show off their applications, talk to Meebo about potential applications, etc.
Bill Snitzer, one of the tech guys at BitGravity, is driving to Los Angeles and showing it live on the Internet. He’s got a webcam up showing the drive and a Google Map mashup with a GPS device showing his progress.
Bitgravity, located in Burlingame, California, hasn’t officially launched. But the company is the content delivery network (CDN) for Revision3 and other video sites. The quality of the video on this site is significantly better than what you see with other live streaming services like Justin.tv and Ustream. I’m looking forward to hearing more about the streaming technology, as well as the Google Maps/GPS hack (some resources for GPS mashup here and here).
United States. Other video bloggers I’ve spoken to suggest distribution to many sites, but always making sure YouTube is top of the list. 
Ustream.TV
LiveVideo.com
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