Live Streaming – Has it advanced any?

The various web sites out there offering the ability to stream live about 6 months ago was new and fresh, had no advertising and easy to find various streams to whatever took your fancy. Basically anyone can set up a web cam and stream but it take bandwidth the cater for many people and this is where they come in, you in fact stream to one server, needing about 400kbps upload and the server relay’s this out to as many as thee bandwidth allows. Bandwidth / Servers are not Free or even cheap for that matter – so why did they offer such a thing (much in the same way YouTub offers Video’s in this sense).

Advertising

One Way to claw some of that money back is to put advertising across the pages and even the live stream as a means to get some income back in but this maybe only works if people are actually clicking on them. I have noticed all of the main players (Ustream, Stickam, BlogTV, Justin.TV) have adverts on there video now – the reason why the stream’s is people were embedding the Stream on there own pages and by-pasing the adverts (replacing them with there own in fact).

People get annoyed with the advertising

I have seen either by the forums or other means people make statements such as:

“I did not give them permission to put adverts over MY Stream”

or

“They should give me some of the revenue – it is me providing the content”

What people seem to have forgotten is that the service has to be paid for in some fashion, it is Free, if you want Advert Free Live Streaming – then you will have to either find something that is paid for or run your own (lot of upstream required).

Moderation

There is nothing more annoying to the vistor then coming to a room, having a chat and then getting kicked off or even banned for what is deemed for no reason. You have no real course of action to complain other then changing your IP and attempting to come back but personally you are fighting a loosing battle. Remember that as they get rid of people – that is one less person who is visting there stream and for every subject, there is many people streaming about it. One some streams, the only thing you loose from the above is the ability to type messages – many have there chat embeded in the stream or in the case of Justin.Tv for example – you can see the chat anyhow even if not logged in.

Tech Streams

I just want to give a special mention to the MANY tech Streams out there – while I give them credit for sitting there and giving free tech support (or at least trying to), you do get what you pay for and not all the advice given will be any good or for that matter be any better then Googling it. Remember also it is hard to type the exact problem – imagine trying to explain an icon on the task bar which comes up and goes quickly, easier to speak but most won’t have voice comms going.

Where are they all heading?

Quite simply I see many of the Live Streams and people as a passing phase and many will move onto something else at some point. I am only speaking about myself in this respect as the things I used to do 1 year ago for example, I do not do now and I find it hard to see someone a year from now still streaming 24/7 unless they have nothing better to do. I see ISP’s bringing in more Capping of data and the streaming sites charging or limiting the time.