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The Chris Gethard Show, a weekly hour-long series running on public access channel Manhattan Neighborhood Network and live-streamed through Justin.tv, ran for 12 straight hours this Election Day, from 12 PM to 12 AM EST. All day, Gethard and the eclectic bunch behind “the most bizarre and often saddest talk show in New York City” kept themselves busy with live music, comedy, stunts and audience interaction, including a 15 minute stretch where the show was co-hosted by a slightly unhinged heckler named Don, as well as a dance party when the election was called in favor of President Obama. A far cry from CNN’s coverage, but right in line with TCGS‘s established blend of awkward stunts and wild improv.

Gethard, a comedian, author, and established fixture of the New York alternative comedy scene, began hosting TCGS in 2009 as a live stage show at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theater in New York, where it accumulated a cult following and some press attention after Gethard successfully used Twitter to book Sean “Puffy/Puff Daddy/P. Diddy” Combs as a guest.

However, once Combs finally did appear on the show (it took a year to schedule a date), Gethard felt that TCGS had peaked in its current format. “It’s hard to top using the Internet to get P. Diddy on your show,” Gethard said via phone.

Thus, when a friend connected Gethard with MNN, a New York public access channel, in June 2011, it became an opportunity to stretch beyond the stage — and New York City, for that matter, thanks to the MNN studio’s ability to live-stream its content.

New York public access is supported by local cable companies as a public service — MNN 4′s only rules for what you can’t do are:

Advertise or sell products or services; use copyrighted material; show animals or humans being injured or killed; slander anyone; or show hardcore pornography, such as penetration or any genital contact. Any shows with adult content or language must be aired after 11:00 P.M.

The lack of restrictions give Gethard and his team plenty of freedom, and the live-streaming opened the series up to a new worldwide audience — however, leaving UCB meant that the show struggled to regain the loyal audience it had found there. “We lost our UCB following, but we rebuilt that. Now people everywehre can see some of the weirder alt comedy stuff happening here in New York,” he said.

Gethard cites the October 27, 2011 episode, “The Great American Presidential Debate and Halloween Spooktacular,” as the turning point for TCGS 2.0, due to a surprise twist in a pre-planned bit.

The afore-mentioned write-in Presidential candidate, comedian Connor Ratliff, was running for President on the campaign “I am 35 years old and legally qualified to be President,” and had issued a challenge to any and all Presidential candidates to debate him on TCGS. He anticipated that no one would even bother replying — thus leaving him alone on stage.

However, he did get two responses: One, from the Romney campaign (which declined the invitation), the other from Jimmy “The Rent Is Too Damn High” McMillian, a New York local legend who campaigns for every elected office, and whose political aspirations went viral in 2010. McMillian wanted to debate. So TCGS made it happen. According to Gethard, “It twisted our arm into doing something a little more elaborate and more high concept.”

Other notable TCGS episodes:

• “The Night of Zero Laughs,” featuring a wide range of panelists from 30 Rock, UCB, College Humor and other New York comedy establishments trying not to laugh at call-in jokes and each other.
• “Ruin This Show,” in which Gethard challenged the call-in and studio audience to disrupt the show at all costs. (Gethard referred to this episode as his least-favorite. “We just sh– the bed real hard on that one,” he said.)
• “Smash Cut to the Future”, in which Gethard travels to the future to defeat a robot army.

All episodes (save the 12-hour election special) are archived on iTunes and Blip, where Gethard says most of the viewing takes place, with episodes getting 35,000-50,000 views. “Uploading an hour-long episode very week isn’t cheap — Blip was best built for us to deal with that, with a lot of infrastructure and control. Also, they really got a kick out of what we were doing and helped us out a lot in terms of promotion.”

What kind of ratings does the show get on public access? Gethard has no idea, because MNN 4 doesn’t track them. But while public access seems like a quaint throwback to a time before YouTube, Gethard likes being on public access, as it hearkens back to the kind of programming he grew up with.

“It’s a part of the past I miss — I miss regional television, stuff that had a lot of heart but not much production quality,” he said. “We think of [TCGS] as a public access television show that we can expand beyond what people think of public access. It can be low budget and silly and crazy at times, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”

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TwitchTV, which was created as an independent platform for video game streams by Justin.tv earlier this year, has grown tremendously since launch. Video gaming had already been a popular form of content on Justin.tv, but the new brand has already reached about 10 million uniques a month, and it is growing at about 10 percent per month, TwitchTV VP of Marketing Matthew DiPietro told us in an email.

The launch of the iPhone app could spur even greater growth for the young gaming site. Believe it or not, the Justin.tv iOS app — which is available on the Apple App Store as a $4.99 download and is one of the highest-grossing entertainment apps available — accounted for about 10 percent of all traffic for the main site, according to DiPietro. TwitchTV’s app will have the benefit of users’ being able to watch all games or streams available, and it will be free.

TwitchTV viewers will be able to browse streams by the game being played, check out featured streams and search from all available streams being broadcast. They can then follow their favorite channels from directly within the app, and those channels will be featured whenever they are broadcasting live. Perhaps most importantly for the video gamer set, viewers can chat live with others through a full-featured chat overlay that runs on top of the live stream.

While the first app launched is for the iPhone, the TwitchTV team plans to release more mobile apps as time goes on. Next up is an iPad app, according to DiPietro, with Android apps also on the way soon.

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Twitvid started out as one of countless Twitter video sharing sites, but it has manage to stick around even as a number of its competitors (12seconds, Twitvid.io, Twiddeo) had to shut down. Part of that may have to do with partnerships with popular Twitter clients like TweetDeck; part of it may be because the service embraced mobile platforms early on, publishing its own apps for iOS, Android and BlackBerry.

However, it’s getting awfully crowded again in the social video sharing space these days, with companies like the Justin.tv spin-off and social video network Socialcam and new startups like Tout trying awfully familiar-sounding ideas.

The biggest test for Twitvid may be how it can adapt to Twitter’s own increasingly aggressive media plans. The relaunched Twitter website incorporates more video, and Twitter also teamed up with Photobucket in June to power its own image hosting. One has to wonder when Twitter will extend this kind of partnership to video clips as well, and what this would do to startups like Twitvid.

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Vamshi Sriperumbudur, Dyyno’s head of marketing, sent us the following infographic, highlighting how people are using the Dyyno Universal Broadcaster (dUb), which provides an easy way for anyone to quickly begin streaming live events. It’s signed up more than 250,000 registered users for its dUb product, with more than three-quarters of them broadcasting at least once.

While anyone can use the product, a number of professional broadcasters actually make money off it. That includes broadcasters that have tied dUb into Justin.tv’s TwitchTV to broadcast live video game streams. (27 percent of Dyyno broadcasters are streaming games.)

It also includes a growing number of broadcasters that use the platform to deliver live, branded video channels on Roku. Some examples include BoMTV, which offers more than 15 TV channels from South India; Flix Universe, which delivers classic Hollywood movies; and VajraTV, which is the Dalai Lama’s official over-the-top TV channel (and the #1 Spiritual channel on Roku). Using Dyyno’s platform, broadcasters can offer subscriptions on Roku, as a way to monetize their content.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user hegemonx.

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But to hear former Justin.tv and new Socialcam CEO Michael Seibel tell it, breaking the social video sharing app out of the live streaming business was always part of the plan. The startup started work on the app about a year ago, after noticing that most of the viewers for videos from the Justin.tv mobile broadcasting app were watching videos on demand. Launched this spring, Socialcam surpassed expectations, hitting a million downloads in just four months and showing much greater engagement by users than was expected.

The decision to go it alone comes as Socialcam is trying to win its place as the top mobile video sharing app. In a phone interview, Seibel said he believes the mobile app space has become one in which there’s a single leader for each vertical application. So for instance, Foursquare is the place to go for location sharing; Instagram has become the go-to app for posting photos. And Socialcam wants to be the app for sharing videos online.

Of course, Socialcam isn’t alone. There’s a whole cottage industry emerging under the “Instagram for videos” umbrella; There’s BlipSnips, Tout, Vibop, Viddy, Vlix and Vloggo. Each has its own particular strengths — Vlix and Vibop, for instance, add easy editing tools, while BlipSnips enables users to tag their friends at specific moments in their videos — but all seek to be the go-to app for sharing short videos with friends from their mobile devices.

To better compete in an increasingly crowded market, Seibel said Socialcam needed to switch from being a “startup within a startup” to actually controlling its own destiny. And so, while the Justin.tv team moves into new digs at the end of the month, the new Socialcam team will be joining video startups like Cull.tv and Squrl in the Founders Den in San Francisco.

Seibel is taking over as CEO of Socialcam, with founder and CTO of Justin.tv Emmett Shear taking the chief executive role at the live streaming business. The focus on the live streaming side will be on TwitchTV — a live streaming site for the gamer community that Justin.tv launched in June.

Seibel wouldn’t comment on Socialcam’s financing, except to say that Justin.tv owned a stake in the independent entity and that it was looking to raise some more financing independently. Socialcam has four team members now; in addition to Seibel, Guillaume Luccisano and Ammon Bartram, who previously worked for Justin.tv, are also founders.

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TwitchTV is a spinoff of live streaming provider Justin.tv dedicated to video gamers broadcasting their competitions, tournaments and training sessions online. Justin.tv has long been focused on the gaming community, and introduced its partner program with a limited number of broadcasters six months ago, even before launching TwitchTV in June. Justin.tv Co-Founder and CTO Emmett Shear told me yesterday during a phone conversation that the partner program has been a full success: “We have gamers on TwitchTV that are literally quitting their day job.”

TwitchTV’s partner program offers participating broadcasters the ability to run pre-roll ads as well as interstitial ads, with gamers deciding themselves when ads are running. Partners can also offer subscriptions for their channels on TwitchTV, something one of the early beta participants has used for an NPR-syle voluntary contribution.

Shear didn’t want to reveal the details of the revenue sharing deal, but he said the CPM rates have been “competitive if not better” than what comparable video services are offering. Participation in the partner program is limited to those with certain metrics including a minimum number of concurrent average viewers, something Emmet credits for the high CPM rates.

TwitchTV isn’t the only site offering video gamers an option to monetize their live streams, and we’ve been fascinated by the growth of video game live streaming in part because it’s such an unlikely success story. People who aren’t into gaming often have a hard time understanding why anyone would even want to watch a broadcast of others playing games.

Gamers, on the other hand, often follow their favorite teams and players with the same dedication as traditional sports fans. Professional players are increasingly finding ways to make a living with their skills, with live streaming becoming one part of their revenue stream. Said Shear: “Some of these (teams) are quite sophisticated businesses in their own right.”

Image courtesy (CC-BY-SA) of Flickr user ECL X-Series Liverpool

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The Justin.tv team continues to add features to the Socialcam iPhone app, including more login options and more places to share videos. It used to be that to use the app, you would be forced to use Facebook Connect to login, but now users can also login with a Twitter account or even create a Socialcam account that is separate from their Facebook identity.

When it launched, connecting a user’s identity through Facebook was one of the key tenets of the app. The Justin.tv folks wanted to reduce the number of possible spammy accounts that showed up, while also ensuring it got some of the network effect of sharing through the social network. But Justin.tv VP of marketing Matt DiPietro told me in an interview that not everyone wanted to tie the account to his or her Facebook identity, so this was changed to give users more options. Along those lines, it’s also added an easier way to find friends through Facebook, Twitter and a users address book.

In addition to more login option, the latest version of the app also has more distribution points for users to share their videos with. In addition to Facebook, Twitter and email, the company has added the ability to share on their Posterous and Tumblr accounts, as well as saving to DropBox.

Finally, the app also has an improved Activity Feed, which allows users to see all the activity that’s happening in their stream, including comments and “likes” by friends. And it now has the ability to crop videos, so that users can share only the moments that matter with their friends.

Download milestones can be tricky for mobile applications: after all, there are many users (like myself) that will download an app, try it out once or twice and never look at it again. But Socialcam appears to actually be connecting with users, based on stats that DiPietro shared with me. The app counts about 330,000 active users a month — and that’s just in-app use. It doesn’t count video views that happen on Facebook or even on the Socialcam website.

Since launching in March, Socialcam has seen some serious competition crop up, with a number of new mobile apps aimed at sharing video on social networks. In recent months, BlipSnips, Tout, Viddy, Vlix, Vloggo and most recently Vibop have all emerged in an effort to become the “Instagram of Video” on mobile devices.

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At the core of Vibop is a “shoot it, shine it, share it” process that simplifies the art of creating mobile videos that are not only personal but also look good once they’re shared with friends. The “shoot it” stage is pretty self-explanatory, but it’s the “shine it” portion of the app that really sets it apart from much of the competition.

The app allows users to add a title and some pretty simple filters or effects — like black and white, fish-eye, sepia — to their videos. Users can also create an intro to their video, using a photo from their photo library with a couple of predefined templates. Once done, they can then share the video through their Facebook and YouTube accounts. The whole process is incredibly intuitive and fast, even for nontechnical folks.

Vibop’s creators hope to make money off the app through in-app purchases of extra effects and intro templates. It’s free to download, with several free effects available. But if you want to spruce things up even more, there’s a wide range of for-pay effects that can be added to your video.

One of the big advantages of Vibop is that all the video editing and processing happens in the cloud. That means that once a video has been shot and processed (uploading of the video happens simultaneously in the background), any effects that are added are done on the back end — meaning that Vibop isn’t taxing your mobile processor with video editing on the device.

Now for the downsides: The big disadvantage to Vibop is that videos are limited to 30 seconds a piece. While that helps with cloud processing, it also severely limits what you can share. The app does have a slider to help you determine the right 30-second moment to share from a longer video clip, but those who want more than that will have to segment videos into different pieces.

With just YouTube and Facebook as distribution outlets, it lags behind a number of other social-video-sharing apps. It’s looking to change that: Vibop product manager Travis White told us in an interview that it’s looking to add support for Twitter and other social networks. But the company is pretty intent on “not creating another social network” and launching its own web destination like Justin.tv’s Socialcam or even Tout.

Which brings us to our last point: Once a video has been created, it’s not available in your camera roll. It can only be watched in the places where it’s been uploaded. You can view it in the app itself, but to view it you need a network connection. And there’s no Vibop private website for users to link to or send friends to that might not be on Facebook, or if they don’t want to share on YouTube.

Vibop has some pretty fierce competition in the mobile video-sharing segment: There’s BlipSnips, Socialcam, Tout, Viddy, Vlix and Vloggo all seeking to become the Instagram of mobile video. Of these, Vibop is most similar to Vlix, which also has added editing features to its social-sharing app. The good news for Vibop is that its step-by-step walk-through process for adding effects and editing will make it much easier to polish videos before sharing them. Now if only they could be shared in more places.

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A Dreamhack contest around the popular game League of Legends alone attracted more than 200,000 simultaneous viewers, according to live streaming video game provider own3D.tv. The Austria-based company is only one of a number of services specializing in broadcasting video game contests — sometimes also called e-sports events — online. All of them are seeing explosive growth, as live webcasts are taking competitive video gaming to the next level, translating it from a sport for insiders to one that is watched by millions.

Own3D.tv began streaming video games online in 2010, and the company now sees more than four million unique viewers per month for its live streams. Own3D.tv CEO Zvetan Dragulev told me during a phone conversation today that the site saw some 250 Gbps of traffic throughput during the Dreamhack event alone, which he attributed in part to the fact that 95 percent of the audience was watching the games in HD, with most streaming at a rate of 1.8 Mbps.

U.S.-based Major League Gaming (MLG) has also seen record audiences in recent months, attracting 117,000 peak concurrent stream views at the Columbus Pro Circuit gaming competition earlier this month. During the weekend of that competition, MLG clocked more than 22.6 million streams.

And live streaming provider Justin.tv has seen e-sports streaming grow so fast that it decided to dedicate an entire site to it. The company launched TwitchTV earlier this month after gaming accounted for around 3.2 million monthly uniques on its main site. Justin.tv Marketing and Communications VP Matthew DiPietro attributed much of this growth to the fact that, for the first time ever, competitive gaming has the chance to reach its full potential audience, thanks to live streaming. “We now have a distribution platform that turns e-sports into a truly live sporting event,” he said.

Sites like TwitchTV and own3D.tv see most of their traffic around events, but they also feature dozens of live video feeds of people playing popular games at any given time. Some of these are just amateurs that like to show off their skills to fellow gamers, but others are actually professional teams preparing for the next big tournament. “It’s like watching a training session of FC Barcelona,” said Dragulev.

Gamers are increasingly monetizing their matches, with live video streaming offering another way to make a living. Live streaming sites have revenue-sharing deals with their professional gaming partners, and DiPietro said that advertisers love the fact that they can cater to such a well-defined audience. Dragulev explained that his company gets 90 percent of its video views from professional teams and events, which attract much higher CPM rates than traditional user-generated live streams. “We want to compete with real TV budgets,” he said.

Part of the secret sauce of video game live streaming has to do with very particular technical issues. DiPietro said that gamers require capabilities to stream from various consoles, and Dragulev told me that his company broadcasts feeds from competitions with a few seconds of delay to prevent competing teams from gathering intelligence about potential targets on the live stream.

But a bigger piece of the puzzle has been for own3D.tv to distribute the vastly growing traffic of e-sports live streaming across a number of CDNs, simply because this really is a global phenomenon: Only between 15 and 18 percent of all viewers that tune into streams from own3D.tv come from the U.S., and almost as many viewers come from Russia. Dragulev believes that this international focus will be key to taking live streaming of competitive gaming to the next step. “The gaming market is just in its infancy,” he told me.

Image courtesy (CC-BY-SA) of Flickr user ECL X-Series Liverpool

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