GigaOM » Livestream

Syrian live streamer killed after being watched by millions

Janko Roettgers — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:00:46 +0000

Syrian citizen journalist Rami Ahmad Alsayeed was killed by the country’s armed forces today, according to a blog post by live streaming provider Bambuser. Alsayeed was using Bambuser to report out of the besieged city of Homs, which has been under heavy attack for days. Some of his footage from recent weeks has been used by major news networks BBC World and Al Jazeera, who have been barred from the country.

Alsayeed and some of his friends had located their camera on a rooftop in the Homs neighborhood of Babaamr, according to Bambuser. Very graphic footage of his body has since shown up on YouTube, and Bambuser relayed one of his latest messages on its blog. It reads, in part:

“Babaamr is facing a genocide right now. I will never forgive you for your silence. You all have just give us your words but we need actions.”

Live streaming was an essential tool in the Arab spring, but has also been under constant attack by the embattled regimes. Last week, Bambuser reported that its site had been blocked by Syria. Ustream and Livestream told us that they hadn’t seen any interference from the Syrian regime so far.

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Silicon Valley Taunts NYC Over Tech Aspirations

Jeff John Roberts — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 21:17:11 +0000

It looks like Silicon Alley has a way to go before it’s taken seriously by its west coast counterpart. This weekend, the San Jose Mercury News published a piece of snark ridiculing New York City’s would-be role as tech usurper.

The dressing down came in response to “Only In the Alley,” a glossy calendar of New York tech types strutting beside their company names. Or, in the words of the Merc News, a confirmation of the city’s reputation for “flashy, soulless advertising.”

The calendar, created by the heads of app developer SNAP Interactive and entertainment site Hotlist, features companies like Livestream, Thrillist and Mashable.

But the west coast is not exactly shaking in its boots.

After issuing a challenge in the introduction — “Bring it on, Silicon Valley” — the calendar offers fashion-shoot-like photos of tech entrepreneurs in New York City, highlighting ideas such as online dating, a database of local doctors, a daily-deals site and an online beauty-products store.

How innovative!

How could analysts think Facebook will have 2012′s biggest IPO when these companies are around? [...]

And feel free to contact IA with ideas about a Silicon Valley response for 2013. Maybe just pictures of the headquarters of the biggest tech companies in the world? They’re all here

Ouch. But then again, if the calendar gambit was intended as a publicity stunt, Silicon Valley’s paper of record took the bait.

More seriously, it’s starting to feel that there may be more at stake in the east-west tech dispute than idle bragging rights.

Recall that Mayor Mike Bloomberg, as part of a bid to make New York a “technology capital,” opened the year promising to learn coding while San Francisco’s mayor last week announced a scheme to bring the tech community directly inside city government.

And it’s still unclear what led Silicon Valley’s intellectual jewel, Stanford University, to abruptly pull out of a contest to install a science graduate school near the Upper East Side (New Yorkers had for months assumed Stanford was the default winner but the school bailed in December and Cornell was selected instead).

It looks like the Silicon Valley vs. Silicon Alley story is far from finished but, on this bitter winter day in New York, the west coast sure looks more appealing for technology companies (and everyone else).

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Where to watch New Year’s on Times Square live online

Janko Roettgers — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 21:00:07 +0000

What would New Year’s be without the traditional Times Square party? People in New York City have been watching the ball drop at midnight for more than a hundred years, and millions from all over the U.S. have been glued to their TV screens for decades to catch a glimpse of the action.

This year, the party is once again live streamed online as well, and mobile apps for Android and iOS come in handy if you don’t want to miss it while on the go.

Here’s how to watch the New Year’s celebration at Times Square live online and on your phone:

The official Times Square live feed will once again be hosted by Livestream, and start on New Year’s Eve at 6 p.m. EST (3 p.m. PST).
EarthCam will give you a bird’s-eye view of the party via Ustream. The webcam is live year-round, so feel free to drop in any time.
EarthCam is also once again providing a 3-D feed of the party on its website.
The Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball App for iOS not only offers you a live feed of the party, but even an option to upload your own face to be shown on the huge Toshiba big screen at Times Square.
The Times Square Official Ball App for Android offers the same thing for your Android phone.
Looking for an alternative to the action in New York? There are too many streams from parties around the world to list them all here, but I want to single out one for originality: Singer-songwriter Daria Musk is organizing a world-wide interactive party with live music via Google+ Hangouts. People can join in via her Google+ feed or simply watch the action unfold on her YouTube page.

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Occupy my TV: The birth of the citizen video reporter

Janko Roettgers — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 00:37:03 +0000

Updated. A police officer calmly walking down a line of sitting protesters, sweeping them with pepper spray: Footage of last Friday’s police actions against peaceful protesters at UC Davis became the most shared video clips on YouTube this weekend, with the two most popular clips attracting more than two million views in just a few days. The video images of the incident are deeply upsetting, but they’re also a defining moment for media in the U.S. It documents the rise of the citizen video reporter, which really just emerged over the last few weeks, ready to occupy our TV screens.

Sure, online video has played a role in U.S. politics long before the current wave of protestors began when people started camping out on Wall Street. There was the Macaca moment in 2006, and there were various attempts by YouTube as well as major TV networks to utilize online video in political discussions. And with people like Glenn Beck and Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks, there are now popular pundits on both side of the political spectrum online. But actual news coverage has nonetheless been dominated by mainstream media organizations.

America’s Egypt moment

That’s not true in other countries. The Arab spring relied largely on this kind of coverage, with people in Lybia recording sometimes horrific footage of military crack-downs with their phones and then smuggling it out of the country to upload it from Egyptian Internet cafes. The work of citizen journalists has been essential for these conflicts, because media is often barred from reporting on the scene.

The same can’t exactly be said for the U.S., where journalists by and large can report freely from protests. However, mainstream media are increasingly facing a different problem, which has never been as apparent as during the Occupy protests: It can only extend itself so much, and be at so many places at the same time. There are hundreds of Occupy protests all over the U.S.. No one could anticipate that a relatively small protest at the University of California at Davis would become a world-wide news event, which is why none of the big broadcasters were on the scene.

For the Occupy protesters themselves, on the other hand, and citizen reporters largely sympathetic to their cause, it’s natural to capture every single moment on video. Watch the footage from the UC Davis campus again, and you’ll see that there are dozens of folks recording everything with Flip cameras, cell phones and even iPads. Whenever something newsworthy happens at any of the hundreds of Occupy protests around the country, you can be sure that footage of it will show up on YouTube only a few hours later. “Since September 17, 47,000 videos tagged with the keyword “occupy” have been posted in the News and Politics category, with a total 73 million views,” a YouTube spokesperson told me today.

A cable show from a cell phone

Many of these citizen journalists are already taking the next step, streaming everything online in real time. Livestream’s CEO Max Haot told me that his site now features 123 live streaming channels from global Occupy protests, clocking more that two billion viewer minutes altogether. 150,000 people watched various streams live when the New York police cleared the encampment in Zuccotti Park last week, he added. Ustream’s PR and marketing manager Tony Riggins told me that the site has seen more than half a million views across its Occupy live streams, and a spokesperson for mobile live streaming startup Bambuser said that it has seen 30 percent more traffic ever since the Occupy protests started.

In the sea of live streams, a few key videographers have been emerging. One of them is Tim Pool, whose TheOther99 live stream has been featured by Time Magazine and who has been called “a perfect example” for citizen journalism by Jay Rosen.

The other is Spencer Mills, also known by his Twitter handle OakFoSho, who has been covering the events in Oakland. Mills started with a live stream with less than ten viewers, but his talent for being in the right place at the right time and his infectious opinionated-man-on-the-street style have helped him to find an audience of tens of thousands.

30,000 watched when he documented the night after Oakland’s general strike when police engaged for hours with protesters, and thousands tune in when Mills reports from the somewhat lengthy and much less eventful “general assembly” proceedings of the Oakland protesters. “We are essentially a small cable show from a cell phone,” said Mills during a recent event with the local Oakland Tribune newspaper.

Check out my video interview with Mills, or continue reading below:

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

From the fitness studio to the news room?

Mills is currently jumping back and forth between his day job at an Oakland fitness studio and long nights of live streaming from various Bay Area Occupy events. He’s constantly tweeting, and is often following leads on Twitter to where the action is. “Twitter is almost the front channel for me,” he said, explaining that his tweets often get even more attention than his live stream.

These days, Mills can be seen at Bay Area protests carrying a LiveU backpack, which features six cellular modems and a battery rig that guarantees hours of uninterrupted live streaming. These backpacks can cost up to $3500 per day to rent, but Mills got his for free from Ustream, which also sent similar equipment to Pool in New York. “What we are seeing is citizen journalism at its purest form,” the company’s PR and marketing manager Tony Riggins told me via email. “This is what Ustream was made for.”

Mills himself is now looking into ways to financially support his video work and go live full time. He’s open to cooperations with traditional media outlets, but doesn’t want to give up on his blend of what he calls autonomous guerilla journalism. “We want it to be live and unfiltered,” he explained.

Sometimes a star, sometimes a target

This raw quality of the footage is what makes the new citizen video reporters emerging as part of the Occupy protests so engaging, but it also comes with some risks to the folks behind the cameras. Police officers have on more than one occasion taken actions against citizen reporters, with the most egregious incident being the rubber bullet shooting of a San Francisco-based videographer a few weeks ago. “You feel like a target if you are out there and you don’t have a press badge on,” said Mills when I asked him whether he’s treated differently than accredited press.

However, the omnipresence of video phones could also eventually lead to more civilized protests and crowd control. Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera tweeted this weekend that after the Davis incident, police officers should always behave as if they’re in a YouTube video that’s picked up by mainstream media. Mills agreed with that sentiment, encouraging others to shoot video in critical situations as well, if only to prevent police officers from following the UC Davis example: “You are the one that makes them think twice.”

Update: Ustream told us late Monday that it has now seen more than 1.1 million views across its 700 Occupy channels, clocking a total of 422,752 viewing hours since the beginning of the protests in September.

Disclosure: GigaOM has a business relationship with Livestream for streaming its conferences.

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DaCast’s new SaaS business model: Streaming-as-a-service

Ryan Lawler — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 22:00:11 +0000

DaCast has long given broadcasters a way to stream live video, but now it’s looking to make it even easier with a new offering it calls “streaming as a service.” With a flexible pricing model and easy set up, it hopes to find a sweet spot between enterprise platforms like Brightcove and free live streaming services like Ustream.

DaCast offers a self-serve offering for broadcasters who want freedom and flexibility in serving up live streams of their videos, with a pay-as-you-go model without any contracts or monthly commitments. DaCast’s solution offers everything a broadcaster might want from such a platform, including an integrated player, Facebook embedding, transcoding, analytics and a merchant account for monetization. The idea is that if you make live streaming easy to do and inexpensive to set up, it’ll become more practical for broadcasters to take advantage of the platform.

One key to DaCast’s streaming-as-a-service business model is that broadcasters only pay for the amount of video that’s actually delivered, rather than paying a monthly license fee to use its platform. As a result, it offers an alternative to expensive video platforms like Brightcove or Ooyala.

DaCast also provides more flexibility for first-time broadcasters than some free live streaming platforms like Ustream or Livestream. Stephane Roulland, CEO of DaCast, said in a phone interview that the platform is not only easy to use, but gives broadcasters the ability to monetize their live streams, either through subscriptions, pay-per-view options or the ability to add their own advertising to their streams.

DaCast, which has offices in Paris and San Francisco, believes that’s a message that resonates with customers, and so far has signed up more than 3,500 broadcasters to use its self-serve platform. The company currently has 11 full-time employees and has raised $1.6 million in funding to date, but is looking to add more with a Series A round of financing.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Esparta Palma.

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Ustream Introduces Premium Memberships for Ad-Free Viewing

Ryan Lawler — Tue, 31 May 2011 02:10:36 +0000

Live streaming provider Ustream is adding another possible revenue stream with the introduction of new Premium Memberships. For $3.99 a month, Ustream viewers will now get unlimited access to any live stream on the site without having to watch pre-roll ads before the video loads.

While those live streaming on Ustream have long had the ability to deliver ad-free broadcasting for a monthly fee, this is the first time the company has enabled end users to opt out of advertising. And believe it or not, the premium subscription option was widely requested by users that would prefer to pay a monthly fee than to have to site through a 15- or 30-second ad before a live stream loaded.

According to a company spokesperson, Ustream received a number of requests for such a service, especially from viewers who were interested in real-time educational channels such as the wildly popular Shiba Inu puppy cam or the Decorah Eagle live webcam. That latter channel is now the most-viewed Ustream channel of all time, with more than 120 million views since being launched earlier this year.

In addition to commercial-free viewing, users will have their comments highlighted in bold and have a “premium” watermark next to their name when they participate in chats alongside live videos. They will also get a premium icon on their user page.

Ustream is just one of many startups to rely on such a freemium business model, in which they introduce a free or ad-supported service for consumers but later add a subscription model that strips out ads or provides additional features. Pandora, for instance, allows its users to listen in to its music streams for free on an ad-supported basis, but users can get higher-quality audio and unlimited streams without ads for $36 a year.

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Royal Wedding Breaks Records, Not the Internet

Ryan Lawler — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 15:19:41 +0000

Updated. The royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton was a very gallant affair, and one that amassed huge global audiences online. Due to a large number of live streams available — including the Royal Family’s own official live feed on YouTube, as well as Tila Tequila’s commentary during the event — viewers from all over were able to tune in live from wherever they were.

Akamai said it saw a peak of 2.9 million simultaneous streams (live and on-demand) across its network during the event~~, a new record for the global CDN provider~~. That number is also nearly double the ~~previous record~~ 1.6 million streams it served for 24 broadcasters during last year’s World Cup. Akamai isn’t the only provider to see traffic spike today — Livestream also reported a new record of 330,000 simultaneous streams at its peak. While DPI vendor Sandvine plans to have a more comprehensive look at the impact the wedding had on traffic soon, preliminary findings show a 20-percent increase in traffic during the event. (More data will roll in as the day goes on, and we’ll update as it comes in.)

But let’s put these numbers into context: 2.9 million viewers, while gigantic for a streaming video audience, is a mere fraction of the number of viewers that live TV series amass every night. The last major royal wedding — between Prince Charles and Princess Diana — reportedly drew more than 750 million TV viewers worldwide, according to Guinness World Records. The Super Bowl averages more than 100 million viewers every year, and that’s just counting U.S. ratings. And the average American Idol episode gets more than 20 million viewers a show week after week, without any royalty involved.

That said, there were a few factors that could actually lower the total number of streams delivered during the event. For one thing, Brits — the prime audience for the wedding — were given a holiday during the festivities, so any that wanted to view it could most likely do so on TV. Unlike the World Cup, which had matches during the work day for many, streams of the wedding for U.S. viewers happened in the early morning hours before work when, once again, TV viewing was more accessible than online viewing.

Despite the large number of video streams during the wedding, the Internet didn’t bend under the strain of viewers tuning into the event, proving that fears of a global Internet collapse were a bit overblown. A spokesperson for Akamai reported there were no outages or problems reported during the event — although U.K. news outlet The Telegraph reported some issues in trying to access the BBC’s website earlier today.

In fact, while peak streams were high, the number of simultaneous page views for news sites was actually well below its previous record. Akamai hit a peak of about 5.4 million page views per minute for its Net Usage Index for News, compared to a record 10.4 million global page views per minute on June 24 last year, a day that saw multiple World Cup matches and the longest-ever Wimbledon match.

Update: This post was updated to reflect some clarifications Akamai made to the original data it supplied to GigaOM.

Update #2: Yahoo reports that is breaking records in terms of traffic and video consumption. Requests per second at the online media company have surpassed previous records, with 40,000 request per second compared to 33,000 per second during the Japan Earthquake. It also reported an all-time record for live video traffic, beating the previous record, the Michael Jackson funeral, by 21 percent. Yahoo also reported record video traffic in the EU and in APAC.

Ustream also reported strong numbers: Between 12am PT Thursday through 9am PT Friday, the live streaming firm reported 1.5 million unique viewers who watched 5.4 million total streams. Ustream broadcasters included: PBS News Hour, CBS News, ET and The Insider.

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Will the Royal Wedding Break the Internet?

Liz Shannon Miller — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 07:01:07 +0000

Whether you’re swept up in monarchical romance or sick of all the People magazine coverage, you’re undoubtedly aware of the impending Royal Wedding between Prince William and bride-to-be Kate Middleton on April 29.

In 1981, Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s wedding was watched by 750 million people on television in 74 countries (the most viewed wedding of all time, according to Guinness World Records), and this ceremony could beat that record. British Cultural Secretary Jeremy Hunt is reported as saying he anticipates two billion people watching. And most of that viewing may be done online — a storm of streaming that could bring down networks and sites around the world.

With coverage of the ceremony scheduled to begin as early as 9 a.m. GMT/1 a.m. PDT, time zones may prevent everyone from watching the ceremony from the beginning, but figuring out where to watch the event isn’t hard at all; multiple streams will be available. The official YouTube channel for the British royal family will be hosting a live stream of the BBC TV feed (without broadcaster commentary).

In addition, there will be many other streams, including one supplied by the AP, that will be seeded across multiple sites with help from video wire service NDN. If you want to live stream the Royal Wedding on your own site, you can do so for a one-time fee of $250. The AP feed is set to last for seven hours, making the event into an all-day affair.

This ease of access, however, does mean potential danger for the networks streaming video. The last live-streamed event of this magnitude, the inauguration of President Obama, sparked “significant traffic jams” according to MSNBC , slowing down government sites and news organizations — and even bringing down NPR.org for a time.

According to Andrew Rubin, CEO of network optimization provider Cymtec, in a small office of 25 people, typically no more than a handful of employees are aggressively using bandwidth for their tasks. But if that number increases dramatically, as it does for live-streamed events, that could dramatically slow down or crash the internal network.

While Rubin believes the time difference will make live stream bottlenecks primarily an East Coast issue, other time zones will be affected as awaking Americans catch up on what they missed via archived video. “No matter what, work is going to be the most convenient place to watch it,” he said. And the variety of locations it can be streamed won’t lessen the load, as its high level of availability will inspire clicks from people who might not have gone looking for a stream.

Rubin’s suggested solution for companies is to give employees permission to watch the event, then do everything possible to centralize viewing, either on television (which will have no impact on networks) or a large PC. “If you flood a network with enough of anything, it can bring it to its knees,” he said.

By taking their ceremony to a networked level, “Will and Kate” are helping to put a new, young and modern face on the British monarchy, one that will be visible on a global level. The question that remains is — will the internet be able to handle it?

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Want to Live Stream Over Facebook? DaCast Shows You How

Ryan Lawler — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 22:00:59 +0000

With Ustream, Livestream and Justin.tv, there are plenty of live streaming platforms out there, and social sharing on sites like Twitter and Facebook has made live events easier to find. But if you’re interested in doing your own live stream and want to add it to your Facebook wall, DaCast now makes it easier than ever to do so.

DaCast offers a self-serve live streaming platform, enabling anyone to quickly and easily create their own live video feeds. The company, which officially launched its live streaming services late last year, has now expanded that capability by adding a Facebook share code a user can enter directly onto his Facebook wall. Once the stream is live, viewers can also share the link with other friends on the social network.

Facebook is increasingly becoming a place where users share and discover videos. Over the past year or so, the social network has grown into one of the top ten destination sites for video viewing. In many cases, content watched on the site consists of personal videos or slideshows, but the social network also has emerged as a place to share interesting videos from third-party sites. With more than 500 million users, Facebook has emerged as a place for videos to go viral and gain mind share.

DaCast isn’t the only live streaming platform that enables Facebook streaming. Both Ustream and Livestream have integrated with the social networking site. But while those integrations were created primarily for live streams of major events, DaCast’s Facebook integration is designed for a different audience. Essentially anyone can create a live video stream and copy and paste the Facebook share code onto his wall.

While that could mean casual users who just want to live stream to a small group of friends, DaCast says it could also apply to event organizers, houses of worship, musicians and other groups that wish to broadcast video to a wide group of users online.

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YouTube Gets Into the Live Streaming Game

Ryan Lawler — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 16:21:23 +0000

After months of testing and tweaking, YouTube announced Friday that it’s rolling out a new live streaming platform for its video partners. With the launch of the new service, which can be viewed at youtube.com/live, YouTube will finally be going up against Ustream, Justin.tv and Livestream, seeking to become the king of live events on the web.

But unlike those services, the live streaming service won’t be available to all; only “approved partners” will have access to the live streaming platform at launch. But who are those partners and how will future live streaming partners be picked? A YouTube spokesperson writes:

“Given our scale of 2 billion views a day, it’s important that we roll this out incrementally over time. Initially, we will be rolling this out to approved partners who are in good standing in regards to our community guidelines. This ranges from partners who have built large audiences over time through their own unique content to premium partners. Our hope is to gradually roll the platform out to thousands of partners over the coming months.”

YouTube has taken advantage of live streaming in the past to deliver feeds of live events, like concerts and sporting events, to its massive audience of viewers. But most of those events were delivered over a partner CDN’s infrastructure. The new live streaming platform was built from the ground up and runs on YouTube’s own infrastructure.

YouTube’s first test of that infrastructure was launched last September, but its alpha run was pretty disastrous, causing YouTube to scale back its live ambitions a bit. In the months since, YouTube has been quietly testing a beta of the live streaming program with approved partners like Revision3.

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