Imagine the Scene – you fancy starting a new live video stream, you have it all planned out on what to show, how often to stream and so forth. You maybe spend time on a nice logo, making some recordings to give people who may come by something to watch which entails speaking to yourself (always fun) and so forth but the visitor count remains a big fat Zero no matter how long you have that stream on.
Let us examine just how Ustream promote certain shows which in turn means people find you. On the front page they have featured, most viewed and highest rated, this means the shows that are already known and have large numbers carry on getting more – great. They also have various sections such as Tech, People, Religion and so forth.It sounds like an easy enough task – you have a tech show, you request to be part of that group and soon people will find you that way?
It seems the un-official word on the street is that you cannot enter these sections until you have quite a few things under your belt such as so many recorded video’s, so many room views and many other things. You can start to see now that it starting to become a chicken and egg problem – you can get listed until you become known and people wil never know you even have a stream unless you spam other channels or get advertising like a crazy man.
By Comparison – all of the other streaming services makes it easy for you to both select a group and for people to find your show. It is also hard to get Ustream to swap to an different IRC Server on your request – while Ustream is the only one to actually feature a proper IRC Server, it is not good. My feeling is that if your are not too bothered about people finding your show and have your own chat client plus are not too phased about the adverts – then Ustream is just fine. If any of this is a problem – I would suggest any of the others out there – they all work kind of – it is mainly down to the chat client.
