“News Alert: #Ustream is inaccessible due to a large scale DDOS attack targeting Russian opposition channels on Ustream.”

The company wasn’t immediately available for additional details. Ustream said via Twitter that it was able to restore services around 6:30am PT, but at the time of writing, some parts remain unavailable.

A Bambuser spokesperson told us via email that the attack against its site started in the early morning hours, adding:

“What we can see is that we are receiving a lot of unusual traffic with lots of small distributed requests which is different to what we normally see. It’s extremely hard to know who is behind a distributed attack like this, nor do we want to speculate about it at this point.”

It looks like Livestream and Justin.tv weren’t affected by the attack. DDOS attacks are regularly used to suppress opposing views and critical citizen journalism, but these attacks tend to be directed against smaller blogs or dedicated opposition websites. Bambuser told us that this marks the first time its site has been victim of a DDOS attack.

This is a developing story, check back for updates.

Update (7:57am PT): We just received the following status update from Bambuser: “We are up since an hour -after being down for almost 4hrs. It’s still heavy load of traffic (requests) but our tech team managed to block parts of it and minimize the effect of the DDOS attack.  ”

Update 2 (9:55am PT): Ustream sent us a more detailed account of the attack, which seems to be ongoing. It apparently started at 5:30am PT and specifically targeted a Russian channel. Most requests originated from Russia, Kazakhstan, and Iran, coming from thousands of individual IP addresses. Ustream CEO Brad Hunstable added: “This is the third DDOS attack in the last few months, specifically targeting Russian citizen journalists on Ustream. This is a actively managed attack of a scale we have never seen that continues to change and iterate as we counter.”

Update 3 (10:57am PT): : Ustream told us that its services are “almost back to 100 percent.”

Update 4 (5:20pm): Ustream has launched its Russian localization ahead of schedule in response to the attack, a spokesperson told us via email: “In light of today’s DDOS attack on Ustream and citizen journalists covering the Russian protests, Ustream has accelerated the development and launch of the Russian language translation and localization feature to help translate the site and empower the voices of those being muted.”

Disclosure: GigaOM has a business relationship with Livestream for delivering its conference content.

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Bambuser footage has been used extensively in recent months by major news organizations to report about the conflict in Syria. The company is concentrating on mobile live streaming, and the AP will also explore to use Bambuser’s platform for its own journalists.

The partnership between Bambuser and the AP is significant in part because it formalizes the relationship between the news organization and citizen video reporters, who on occasion are thrown into the spotlight just because they happen to be live streaming from what turns out to be a major event. The AP will credit any footage used in its coverage with the Bambuser username of the person who shot it. That’s a big step up from how footage has been used in the past: Major news networks regularly show footage on TV, only to describe its origin as “found on the Internet.”

It’s also an important step for Bambuser, which has been working on casting itself as a platform for high-quality footage captured with mobile phones. The company introduced a new technology last year that makes it possible to broadcast live with limited bandwidth over mobile networks, and then upload additional video frames from a Wifi network to enhance archived footage.

Check out our previous interview with Bambuser CEO Jonas Vig and Chairman Hans Eriksson:

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Citizens in Homs have been reporting on the attacks through live streaming for days. Their footage has been picked up by numerous major media organizations, including the BBC and CNN, which are barred from reporting in the country. A Bambuser spokesperson estimated that about 90 percent of the footage coming out of Syria on recent days was originally broadcasted via Bambuser.

This isn’t the first time of live streaming and video hosting sites being blocked during the Arab Spring. Egypt and Lybia cracked down on Internet use during the uprisings in both countries, and Lybians resorted to sneakernet methods to smuggle footage out of their countries, uploading clips from Internet cafes in Egypt to circumvent their government’s censorship.

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The Swedish live streaming startup wants to use the challenge to become a little better known in the U.S., but Eriksson told me last week that it’s also an experiment in interactive live streaming. “It’s about challenging people to participate and to contribute,” he said. Eriksson tried the same thing in London earlier this year, and he was surprised by the spot-on suggestions from countless strangers. “The Internet and social media bring a lot of good out of people,” he told me.

The biggest challenge for the New York experiment could be mobile broadband connectivity. Eriksson complained about the poor quality of 3G network connections when I met him in San Francisco a few days ago, and his experiences in New York haven’t been much better, judging by a recent post on the Bambuser challenge Tumblr:

“How do New Yorkers get things done? The network here is really really bad. After a lot of hassle and calls, we finally got our equipment working. And even though we’re broadcasting on a 4G network, the speeds are a LOT slower than 3G in Europe. It’s a great city – really buzzing with excitement – but it’s lumbered with a third world network.”

Bambuser was founded in 2007 in Sweden, and has since established itself as a live streaming startup with a strong focus on mobile video. The company recently launched new versions of its iOS and Android apps that support a so-called complement data approach: Users can live stream at a lower quality first, and then simply upload any missing frames for a high-quality archive version.

Check out this video interview I did with Eriksson and Bambuser CEO Jonas Vig early last year:

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Bambuser calls this “complement data” technology, and company CEO Jonas Vig told me that it was developed in-house. “Our proprietary streaming protocol adapts the frame rate in order to keep the video at a minimal latency,” Vig said, adding: “In order to not compromise the on-demand frame rate of the video, we developed the complement data technology to re-insert any frames that (weren’t) transmitted in real-time.”

Vig went on to explain that Bambuser doesn’t have a set minimim frame rate. Instead, when the frame rate drops too much compared to the original video, it simply suggests to shoot with a lower resolution. The apps also always prioritize audio. “A good flow and consistency in the audio is what the users often perceive as most important,” said Vig.

Optimizing the archived stream frames after a live stream has ended makes sense, considering that in many cases, the majority of users actually watch broadcasts after they’re over – something that Justin.tv recently paid tribute to with the launch and eventual spin-off of its Socialcam platform.

But restricting the upload to the dropped frames as opposed to re-uploading the entire file also is something that should make both mobile operators as well as end users who increasingly face bandwidth caps happy. Said Vig: “It’s significantly more efficient if you only have to patch, say, 15 to 25 percent of the frames to get a vastly improved viewing experience on demand, compared to having to upload a new version of the full video.”

He added that this approach will also take much less time, meaning that the full-quality version will be available sooner. (To learn more about challenges and opportunities of mobile bandwidth constraints, check out our Mobilize conference, happening next week in San Francisco.)

The new Bambuser apps will also offer a Google Maps mashup that will show where live streams are happening as well as an interesting take on live chat: Bambuser will replay past live chats synchronized with archived videos to give users a sense of what people were talking about when a live event unfolded.

Check out our previous interview with Bambuser CEO Jonas Vig and Chairman Hans Eriksson:

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This summer, a battle of wills has been taking place in six different shopping malls around the country, in what is called the Kaivuriskaba challenge. And that challenge is to sit in a Takeuchi mini-excavator (worth $45,000) longer than the other five guys also sitting in backhoes. Competitors get one half-hour break a day to shower and to use the restroom. The winner gets to keep his backhoe.

Now get this: This competition has already been going on for the last three months.

Three men remain of the initial starting six, and they can currently be monitored via multiple live feeds powered by Swedish live-streaming company Bambuser. Don’t get too excited, though — during the Finnish daytime, the action primarily consists of the guys scanning iPads, speaking Finnish, listening to Finnish music and participating in a live chat with the Finlandians actively following the competition. (Most of the live chat defies Google Chrome’s attempts at translation, but seem to range from discussing the other competitors to asking questions like, “What’s your favorite song?”)

Sponsors include the Finnish Apple store Mustapekka, which provided the iPads and other products being used by the competitors, and of course, Takeuchi, the maker of the backhoes. Those who remain are committed to victory — Kimmo Frisk, whose backhoe is located in the city of Espoo, has pledged to “stay until Christmas if I have to,” according to a press release.

The contest was created by Jukka Mutanen, who became “a Finnish hero” in 2010 when he pledged to drive a backhoe 1,000 kilometers across Finland if his Facebook group got 50,000 fans. Backhoes only go about 4 miles an hour, so it took him about a month, which he live-streamed — thus beginning the trend.

If this is fake, it’s an incredibly elaborate prank — there’s an archive of videos from the competition going back three months, and those competing can all be found on Facebook. (18-year-old Arto Kojonen, who is sitting in a backhoe in a Lappeenranta mall, claims his favorite TV show is House.) Plus, when you consider other endurance challenges that exist in the world, buying into the concept of Kaivuriskaba isn’t too tough.

Why write about this at all, you might ask? Well, as a branded content case study, the Kaivuriskaba challenge is probably relatively successful — for one thing, I now know a lot more about Takeuchi backhoes than I did before this article. But beyond that, there’s just something incredibly charming about the idea of these remaining gladiators, sleeping as best they can in their glass-walled cages, waiting for the day when one of them can drive his backhoe to freedom. Thank you, social media, for reminding us just how wonderfully weird the world can be.

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Bambuser, founded in 2007, is kind of like Sweden’s Ustream or Justin.tv. The company is providing live streaming services, but has been focusing mostly on content captured by mobile devices, and Eriksson told us this week that Bambuser has a solid six-figure user base. Most of these users are surprisingly based in the U.S., but alliances with public broadcasters in Northern Europe have also helped to get many more users enthusiastic about consuming as well as producing live content. Check out the complete video interview below the jump.

Bambuser’s U.S.-based competition has in the past been plagued by copyright issues, with live streaming provider LiveStream recently alleging that competitors Ustream and Justin.tv allow “preventable content infringement” on their platforms for the sake of higher ad revenues.

However, all the big U.S.-based live streaming companies have also instituted technical measures against live TV piracy. Eriksson told me that this hasn’t been that much of an issue for Bambuser just yet, adding: “What’s good with the social media scene today is that it’s very self-regulating.” Users would usually flag infringing or inappropriate content, which would help a lot with policing Bambuser.

Vig and Eriksson told me that Bambuser is primarily looking at B2B to monetize their site. The company announced a deal to equip emergency personnel with live streaming technology earlier this week.

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LiveResponse will combine live video from Bambuser with Yahoo Maps to allow first responders to instantly communicate the severity and details of a situation and enable emergency response leaders to provide the right assets. The technology could also be used by police, private security services and service technicians, according to Ideaviate. Question is, will it lead to even more accident footage being leaked to video-sharing sites and mainstream media outlets?

LiveResponse was trialed by select firefighters and ambulance workers in Sweden last year, and Gotenborg’s Deputy Fire Chief Håkan Alexandersson went on the record in a press release provided by Bambuser saying that there are “great practical benefits” to such a solution. Comparable technology has been very expensive, but LiveResponse works with ordinary iPhones as well as Android and Symbian smartphones.

Of course, there have already been anecdotal reports of emergency workers shooting photos and videos of well-known accident or crime victims and selling them to the highest bidder. One can only imagine what could happen once they’re live streamed, ready to be captured and sold by anyone able to get their hands on the stream.

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