One of the leaders in streaming video is aiming to become the superlative live video broadcast service inside Facebook.
UStream, which has built its reputation for live streaming in part through its celebrity users, is promoting its new Facebook app Broadcast for Friends (BFF), as a way to “empower everyday people broadcasting what they believe to be important to their world,” said a rep. The app is separate from the primary Ustream.tv product, which includes a phone app but requires users to have Ustream accounts and encourages a channel subscription model. BFF is a standalone FB app, evoking products like Socialcam and Instagram that include filters that can be applied to video and image capturing, and which create an archive of your content inside the app. While streaming, a user can choose to make the video private, visible to friends, or to the public. Viewers can comment on the video as it’s streaming as well.
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Yesterday, we tracked Socialcam’s rise as a competitor to native mobile video apps for smartphones. YouTube has been the leader in online user-generated video, but that lead position hasn’t translated to mobile creation. Only about four percent of the videos uploaded to YouTube are mobile.
In the podcast above, I spoke with Francisco Varela, YouTube’s Director of Global Platform Partnerships, about its evolving mobile strategy. As Socialcam’s Michael Seibel did in our interview this spring, Varela emphasized YouTube’s focus on enabling more video creators and frictionless sharing of what they make. (more…)
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Michael Seibel is the CEO of mobile video sharing app, Socialcam, and former CEO of Justin.tv. During his five years with Justin.tv, it became the largest live video site on the web, and now boasts more than 30 million unique visitors each month. His new venture, Socialcam, spent weeks in the number one spot in Apple’s free app store this spring. In this podcast, Seibel talk to Turnstyle’s Nishat Kurwa about what it takes to build and maintain a vibrant start-up.
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