Global Neighbourhoods: Why Ustream will change mainstream: Shel Israel has a well thought out and written executive brief on one of the hottest new digital media companies, UStream.
Kristopher Tate and I have been on UStream for most of the past week as we’ve interacted with the Zooomr community during our Mark III upgrade and really like it. Shel digs into other ways that the technology is being used and talks about how UStream sees itself as a platform to serve a whole new world of internet and personal TV.
Despite some early technology glitches here and there, UStream is poised to become the first company to finally make long tail live television a reality. UStream is easy enough that just about anyone can use it and has tremendous application in the future.
I predict that just as blogging has exploded, so will personal broadcasting. Personal broadcasting is in some ways even more powerful than internet video, because it allows more interactivity when done live.
Last Friday night while we were broadcasting ZooomrTV my friend Robert Scoble stopped by and we were quickly able to link him and his son Patrick in who joined us for a fun and interesting chat with over 100 people.
We like the technology so much at Zooomr that we’ve actually built a ZooomrTV channel into Zooomr Mark III where Kristopher and I will broadcast live regularly and interact with the Zooomr Community. This type of tool allows an unprecedented degree of transparency and access for community building companies and here is where I think you’ll see it’s initial big push.
Eventually though even as companies as large as Microsoft embraced blogging and videoblogging in the past, I’d expect that you see even the largest of companies with their own TV stations.
This is the future.
Thomas,
Team Ustream is delighted that you’re going to keep Ustreaming after the Mark III launch. We’ll certainly do our best to keep improving the product and listening to our users.
Tom, while the Ustream technology is cool, I fail to see what substantive benefits it brought to the Zooomr upgrade. All I could see is you getting a headache fielding the same questions, ad nauseam, from people popping in and out. And as for the innovative ideas thrown around, please don’t kid yourself. A Zooomr magazine… Zooomr photo galleries… You could have come up with those on your own, or they could have been easily emailed to Zooomr, no need to waste time in an endless video chat that completely tired you out.
And as for Kris, I said it before and I’ll say it again. I see no benefit in seeing him sleep or code. You people have got to think about the image you’re projecting to the world. Do you want to get serious, or do you want to build a happy go lucky sort of branding, the sort that says “yeah, we might ship today, or we might not, ’cause we’re sleeping and/or listening to music right now”…
Where I see Ustream benefitting Zooomr is in holding short, half-hour or hour-long online meetings, sort of like press sessions, where you talk live with Zooomr users. That would be useful, but they’ve got to be structured, on topic, and not spill over their allotted time. Those sorts of things would not exhaust you and would prove informative to both you and the Zooomr users.
I’m excited about it because it means I can work with directors via the Internet in near real-time. This will be very handy when I’m scoring reels – I can do it “live” with the producers versus my current method: emailing 20+mb .mov attachments back and forth for proofing….
Tom, you’re winning me over with this live video stuff. Just watched Kris talking to the Sun rep on the phone, and that was something you don’t see every day. Truly hope Sun is willing to help, and that Zooomr is back up soon!
If nothing else, live video is an interesting new level of transparency. I still say that it’s not for every day use. It’s really useful in small doses, or turned on for urgent situations like the ones Zooomr is going through right now.
what they really need is some IM integration, so that when something interesting is happening [ie. NOT thomas hawk eating a sandwhich] they can put an alert out via IM and then the subscribers can all pile into the room to watch what’s up.
either that, or do interesting things all the time.
because otherwise this is leading to 100 people watching kristopher tate bathe, and i assure you that nobody wants to see that.
though i ought to clarify that he SHOULD bathe, but that people shouldn’t have to watch him bathe.