![]() You can also see the Streaming Learning Center text overlay on the upper left of the video in Figure 1, another nice (and rare) design option. That’s how I created the link to my book beneath the player in Figure 1. Beyond that, Ustream lets you create extensions that display links beneath your videos to products that you sell (on Amazon, iTunes, or Thumbplay), your Twitter and Facebook pages, and banners that you can link to your website or any other site. On the design side, you can add iFrames to your channel page, creating custom content boxes that you can populate as desired. You get all the expected social media options such as tweeting, liking to Facebook, and +1-ing to Google+. Once completed, you can add highlights in your broadcasts, which are essentially cue points with a short text description that viewers can jump to. Notable features include the ability to schedule broadcasts, which appear as upcoming shows on your channel page. Ustream offers very rich channel pages and an equally rich broadcast experience. Corporate sites might also value the ability to moderate all comments before they appear, while all users will appreciate the easy ability to download previous broadcasts. You can also make your channel private, remove it from, and restrict embedding to specific URLs. You can make any individual video private or only viewable by those in a group. ![]() Ustream also offers lots of control over your videos. Ustream offers extensive monetization programs, including advertising splits, and pay-per-view and subscription offerings. My only reservation is the clumsy embedded player it would return me to the Ustream channel page when I click any videos in the library. Otherwise, Ustream is competent throughout, with highlights such as the ability to deliver multiple user-selectable streams. Ustream is the largest live streaming service provider and offers an unlimited free live streaming service funded by advertising, as well as white-label versions starting at $99 per month. So here, I looked at the feature set and ease of use of other encoders offered by the site, as well as how easy the service made it to use third-party encoders such as the Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder and Telestream, Inc.’s popular Wirecast. I also looked at how the embedded player performed on Android and iOS devices and whether the site could embed a video feed into Facebook, as opposed to providing a link back to the channel page.Īll of these LSSPs offer browser-based encoding tools driven by the Adobe Flash Player, which provided ease of use but universally poor quality since Flash Player uses very outdated codecs. Regarding the embedded player, I looked at how the feature set compared to the channel page for example, whether you could access the same level of chat and social media-related functions and your video library. For those who want to control the distribution of their videos, I also looked at the access control options available for each site and alternatives for moderating or otherwise controlling chat and comments. When comparing the channel pages, I looked at page configurability, monetization options, the number of eyeballs that the streaming service could direct to your video, social media options, and the playback experience on iOS and Android devices. This is obviously most important to organizations that want the bulk of their views to come on the channel page, as opposed to an embedded player on their own site or on a third-party site. The channel page is the page on the service’s website where viewers go to watch your videos. In the pages that follow, I present reviews of these four services there are more out there, but these four have emerged as leaders, particularly during the Arab Spring and worldwide Occupy protests of the past year.Īll live streaming services providers (LSSPs) share three main components - the channel page, the embeddable player, and encoding options - and these are the three areas I focused on in the reviews that follow. Live streaming can be free or relatively inexpensive, and live streaming services such as Ustream,, Livestream, and Bambuser are all reasonably easy to use. If you have a camcorder at any enterprise, institutional, or even social event, you should consider streaming that event live.
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