Some Live streaming Options off the hook | Advantage Social
February 3, 2010 Leave a Comment
It’s here. Our primary reason for inventing Bell’s grand device, or this hellish broadband competition where everyone’s changing providers every three months just a 100 years later (more) The eponymous podcast has gone live.
A lot of the work of the world gets done using Cisco and Nortel’s Video Conferencing Systems and all that infrastructure. For the consumer, they all are beyond the wallet..A lot more of the brands are getting a whiff of it with digital media revenues picking up speed in the last few months. This boom is riding what essentially started with downloading songs, and the iTunes store was one of the first in the legally validated ones with a great repertoire of mostly audio, not even 7-8 years back.
In these last two-three years however, these developments have just raised the bar to where people expect more uninterrupted direct telecasts / webcasts on the web for work, for play and with twitter and Facebook among others, just plain instant fun. The business model is definitely unproven. It is the fancy or a vector of the amount of fancy taken by each new user, that has pushed money behind most of these ventures almost instantly. The latest one is ustream.tv. After a $11.1 milion financing in April 2008 from Asia Centric Doll Capital Management(DCM). Please get all the linked links at Mashable and FT, for all the stories that led to this one.
DCM has backed Intuit’s Paycycle, Cisco’s Arroyo and quite a few NASDAQ listed network companies. After the early round Ustream.TV got a $75 million dollop from a group led by Softbank( these guys manage to get a group every time) Ustream gets 50 million unique views a month and 10 m users but depends on advertising for revenue. Kerrplunk!
There are others in the video live streaming business with flawless reproduction. The infamous You Tube is getting on the job with the latest hot button game from India. The $2 billion IPL franchise has given exclusive rights to You Tube to get its matches telecast live to millions across the globe. the #1 in Sports, NFL has been pretty up to it with Videos on the web as well. Through the available audio streaming for live games, it has done well commercially with the products. The time delayed Video snips and the entire repertoire available online has been able to let them make a boast about their online business and the NFL Network. The game videos are a big success on the Itunes store afterwards, but lastng arrangements have not been made. The live score trackers would be an amazing model to recreate for IPL and others in the Soccer world that want to compete for the game
I love my 12seconds.tv I find a lot of young urban followers getting on it in my tweetdeck beta since last year. Livestream.tv was a screaming success with MSA and Zhu Min natting in Davos about our new Economy with Larry Summers and Dominique Strauss Kahn from the IMF. in.com is among some others who got tired of even thinking of making a commercial case and have put all the Viacom business channels on the web free in live streaming.
I am still a little sensitive about Online advertising though. Except on a few select sites like Hula.com and NFL, it is mostly of a denigrating quality and does not seem like a lasting basis for revenue. Catch the latest video viewership numbers? These could simply be live streaming numbers in a couple of years?
Online video viewing is more ubiquitous than ever. According to comScore, in the month of December 178 million people watched 33.2 billion videos, with the average viewer watching 187 videos per month in the U.S.
