Brad Hunstable started Ustream, an online video platform,
with a fellow West Point graduate back in 2007 to help American
troops overseas communicate with multiple friends and family
members at the same time. It was not long before its uses extended
well beyond the military.
Celebrities, politicians and organizers of events like rock
concerts and high school football games soon discovered that
streaming services offered by Ustream and the other leading
start-up provider, Livestream, could help expand
their audience online. Now, the huge amount of user-generated
live video
produced by the Occupy Wall Street movement has delivered what
could be a watershed moment for these companies, potentially
helping them gain the audience needed to become viable
businesses.
With cellphones, iPads and video cameras affixed to laptops,
Occupy participants showed that almost anyone could broadcast live
news online. In addition, they could help build an audience for
their video by inviting people to talk about what they were
seeing.
“It is a very immersive, interactive experience,” Mr. Hunstable
said. “Something is changing when a person with a cellphone video
camera can command an audience around the world.”
Max Haot, the chief executive and a co-founder of Livestream,
recalls getting the cold shoulder when he was pursuing investors
three years ago. Some of them flatly dismissed the idea of live
streaming, he said, telling him online users preferred to watch
video on their schedule, not at appointed times.
“The point that everyone missed was that people are not watching
live streaming the way they watch a four-minute video on YouTube,”
said Mr. Haot, whose New York-based company now has about 120
employees around the world. “They are watching so that they can be
there and connect with an event.”
A live chat window runs alongside the video player on both
Livestream and Ustream, giving users an opportunity not only to
watch events as they unfold but comment on them, too. Since the
first Occupy protest in Lower Manhattan last September, people from
all over the globe have jumped into the conversation.
As a result, traffic to the sites has soared, and so has the
amount of time spent viewing videos. For example, viewing time in
the United States on Livestream totaled 411 million minutes in
October, up from 270 million minutes in July, according to Dan
Piech, product manager for video and social media at comScore, the
analytics measuring firm.
Ustream is now also used by big brands like MTV and CBS News,
which turned to its Ustream channel last Thursday to stream live
video about the Virginia Tech shooting from its local CBS
television affiliate.
On Ustream, Mr. Hunstable said, there are now about 700
Occupy-related channels, with 70 percent of the live streaming
content created on mobile phones and about 89 percent of it viewed
on mobile phones. Traffic to the site has increased by 14 percent
since the movement began producing content.
The number of Occupy channels on Livestream is now about 120.
Among them is the Globalrevolution.tv
channel. It operates out of a makeshift television studio in the
Bushwick section of Brooklyn and is considered the main channel for
the movement.
Vlad Teichberg, 39, a former derivatives trader on Wall Street,
is among the volunteers who aggregates live streams from the
movement’s activities around the world. He first started live
streaming from the protests in Madrid last May and then began using
the technology to stream live video from Zuccotti Park in Lower
Manhattan and from various other protest sites. “We will cover what
the mainstream media will not cover and then propagate it using
social media,” he said.
This week the channel delivered live coverage from several
Occupy-related events around the country, including a march in
Washington and a campaign to fight foreclosures in Los Angeles and
New York. In Boston, Occupy organizers positioned 15 smartphones to
help deliver live video from their tent city as a way for people to
closely monitor the police who have been trying to move the
protesters.
Both Livestream and Ustream officials say they simply operate
platforms and are not supporting the movements. They have made some
adjustments on their platforms and provided some extra resources to
accommodate Occupy movement video.
Mr. Haot removed advertising from the Occupy channels after some
brands complained that they did not want their ads appearing next
to streaming video of protesters. Ustream lent more sophisticated
video equipment to two citizen journalists, Tim
Pool in New York and Spencer Mills in Oakland, Calif., after
they consistently delivered high-quality streams. Neither of them
is a trained journalist or highly skilled videographer, but they
each managed to quickly build highly engaged audiences. Mr.
Pool’s channel has had more than 874,000 views since September
and has had as many as 28,000 live viewers at a time.
Despite increased volume and popularity, live streaming services
face considerable challenges before becoming highly successful
enterprises, analysts say.
“No question that what has been taking place in the world has
done quite a bit to propel the adoption of services on platforms
like Ustream and Livestream,” said Dan Rayburn, principal
analyst for Frost & Sullivan and executive vice president of
StreamingMedia.com. “But from an
investor’s standpoint, there are a lot of questions to be
asked.”
Mr. Rayburn said that one of the most important questions for
live streaming services was whether they would be able to take
their platforms to the next level and manage costs in an
ever-changing landscape that includes YouTube, which has not yet
fully embraced live streaming. “Can they scale the business fast
enough while reducing their internal costs so they can make money?”
he asked.
Mr. Haot said he expected that revenue for Livestream would be
about $25 million in 2012, double the amount generated this year.
Mr. Hunstable predicted that Ustream’s revenue, which he described
as being under $20 million this year, would also double in 2012.
Both sites derive the bulk of their revenue from advertising. They
also offer premium channels without advertising for monthly fees
and full production services if a brand or an event organizer wants
a skilled team to stream an event or a red-carpet premiere.
Livestream and Ustream both said that they were looking at
adding new features in the coming weeks aimed at increasing
traffic, content and revenue. But they also said they recognized
that competition could come anytime from new start-ups or from
YouTube, which has an average of 161 million views monthly in the
United States, according to comScore. In April, YouTube made video
live streaming available to a limited number of participants in its
partners program.
“YouTube is the behemoth in the space,” said Mr. Piech, the
product manager for comScore. “No one else comes close to YouTube’s
audience. If YouTube wanted to open a live streaming service, they
could gain a significantly larger audience.”
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