NEW YORK (May 19, 2009) — Mogulus today announced it has changed its name to Livestream (www.livestream.com) to more effectively brand and broaden its leadership position in the rapidly growing live video streaming industry.

With Livestream, anybody on the Internet who can connect a video camera to a computer can instantly stream live video worldwide, 24×7, via their own Livestream.com channels or to video players embedded on their own websites or social networks. To date, more than 300,000 people have registered and launched live video channels using Mogulus/Livestream since its introduction in 2007.

“Livestream is doing for live video streaming what YouTube did for on-demand video clips,” said Max Haot, Livestream CEO and co-founder. “While we didn’t invent live streaming, we’re removing the barriers – making live video production and streaming easy and affordable for anybody to use and experience.”

Haot maintains that live video is just the next logical step in the evolution of the ‘real-time web.’ “Consider how the demand for connecting communities and information in real time on the Internet has grown through simple services like Twitter… and, that’s just texting!” he said. “Its easy to see that live video streaming is well positioned to become a key force moving us toward richer, more immersive content experiences and communication.”

Livestream is available to producers and aspiring broadcasters two ways: as a free, advertising-supported service; and Livestream Pro, a premium service that provides producers advanced features with a white-label, graphics-neutral experience. It’s free of advertising employing a pay-for-usage model that starts at $350 per month.

Premium Service Passes 1,000 Paying Customer Mark

In related news, the company announced that more than 1,000 producers and media companies are now using LiveStream Pro since its first introduction just five months ago. Well known Pro users include the World Economic Forum, C-Span, USA Today and “The Dog Whisperer” Cesar Millan.

“Daily signups for both our free and premium services are accelerating at an unprecedented rate,” said Haot. “Each week, thousands of event organizers, broadcast outlets, newspapers, religious leaders, video producers, high schools and universities are discovering the inherent value that live video broadcasting over the Internet brings to the delivery of their message. It’s extending their reach, in a highly cost-efficient, targeted and professional manner.”

“We’re also finding that Livestream’s interactive features such as chat makes it possible for event producers and media companies to easily interact with their audiences, and often distant constituencies – providing a more interactive experience than is currently offered by traditional broadcasting.“

Livestream Pro provides production and distribution tools previously found typically in television newsrooms and video-production houses. Geared toward the needs of experienced content producers, Livestream Pro includes features and tools such as: multiple screen formats (4:3, 16:9, 2.39:1 and custom), advertising removal and/or control, white labeling, ad-network monetization, analytics, HD streaming, increased storage and professional terms & support.

“We realized early on that live streaming is more than just talking heads and a web cam,” remarked Haot. “Users are demanding higher production value along with more powerful, yet easy-to-use tools – enabling them to deliver a studio-like experience that offers something more to the viewer than what they can see on broadcast TV. That’s where Livestream is headed.”

About Livestream

Founded in 2007 as Mogulus, Livestream is based in New York and has already received a combined $12.7 million in funding from angel investors and Gannett Co. The company employs 40 and has an additional office in Bangalore, India.

In my Continued review of each of the Web Streaming services offering anybody armed with a webcam and a microphone to host there very own show, I now turn my attention to Mogulus – This looks different from most of the others on offer and has a more professional feel to it – which we shall see.

The Show Page

You will notice that Mogulus does not brand the video on the top right like Ustream for example and the adverts don’t see as frequent as most of the other services and you have the ability to show either a normal size video or a lareg (right across the page) version – esp good for FME Broadcasting. When the Video is of the Smaller size – the Chat box sits on the right while the larger version has the chat underneath.

Configuring your Channel

Starting from the left on the many options you can set, Full name of Show, Channel Logo, Profile (which can inlude HTML Code), Description, Banner, Tags and Category. Next to this we have Style Channel

This page is mainly for the Text / Graphic Overlay which can be used for a Description maybe or the Presenters name / subject along with moving logo and so forth. There is a 3rd Tab which allows you to manage & Add extra people (Producers) so you can have other people log in and allow you to switch to them – like someone Live on location for example.

Manage Library

This is the main Storage Area of both clips you have recorded and one’s you can bring in from YouTube and other places. You can create folders and put whatever into each of these such as YOUTUBE, Recording, Reviews and so forth. This forms the basis of the other tabs later on. To bring in a YouTube Clip, You can search right on the menu as above and it brings the video across and stores it on Mogulus.

Broadcast Live

This forms the main Console of the live production – you get to see any Feeds on the left (You, FME, Procaster, Other Presenters)  and a StoryBoard for stored Clips from the other menu. Bascially to give a good example of this amazing feature:

You can cue up yourself and begin the broadcast, you switch to another presenter either in the same room or in fact anywhere in the world and then cue in a clip you have previously done – say a review of a new Mouse and finally back to you to finish this off. You Could record this entire lot and it will play over and over.

You get to Broadcast from the Web Browser as above, Flash Media Encoder or ProCaster – the max setting as a FREE User is 500k – this should be good enough for most but it is something to bear in mind if you have higher and want to push out more than 500k on FME.

AutoPilot

One thing that sets Mogulus aside form the others is the ability to set up a collection of Videos, either recorded, Clps or both and for them to play over and over. What this means is that anytime somebody comes to your show – they have something to watch and not met with a “off-line page”. This feature alone is what I feel makes Mogulus look more professional then any of the other.

Video On Demand

This allows the viewer to choose what Video’s they want to watch, you drag and drop the clips in there – so not every single video has to be on offer, a rather good idea and closer to a TV type thing these days (Catch up).

Widgets

This allows you the broadcaster a choice to embed the player were you need and it comes with various options, some of which are only there for PRO Users (such as Branding).

Chatting

By Default the stream has a chat on the right hand side of the video and allows people to chat, the problem is it keeps the last page of chat so you both have no idea how long it was that someone came in, said Hi and left but also the fact you cannot manage the chat from that screen – you have to go to the Broadcast Live console and manage it from there which makes sense if your using the web page to broadcast but not if your using FME. Procaster has the chat built into the App BUT only comes up when you broadcast. You have the option to disable chat or stop people from speaking. You can use this “Disabled”Chat function to Put in there info you might want people to know such as IRC Server or Live Pages.

Pro Options

As you can see – $350 a month for One channel is quite a bit of money – this is aimed at more professional outfits maybe. On the Free Account, you are restricted to Max 500K and so forth (along with Adverts) but still more then usable.

Conclusion

The many options on the settings can make it look very complicated and indeed it seem that most don;t like Mogulus and prefer maybe the simpler Ustream but if you take all the options, personally I feel this is the better one. When I had some technical issues – ben from the forums (admin) was only to happy to help – so on support it wins hands down.

]]> http://www.liquidsilver.org/2009/05/mogulus-professional-video-streaming/feed/ 0 http://www.liquidsilver.org/2009/04/mogulus-release-procaster/ http://www.liquidsilver.org/2009/04/mogulus-release-procaster/#comments Thu, 16 Apr 2009 07:19:32 +0000 Mauldor http://www.mauldor.com/?p=817

Popular streaming video provider Mogulus has released a free desktop broadcasting app called Procaster, designed for use with its service. The feature set looks pretty amazing: it promises to broadcast anything from a web cam or from your screen — or both, side-by-side — with synced audio and no lag in frame rate. There’s also a game broadcasting mode that seems explicitly targeted at World of Warcraft players, and audience interaction features, like live chat, that work automatically with any broadcast.

One big advantage of Procaster is that it’s free, and so is the Mogulus service, so you the startup costs to create your own web show are extremely low. You can browse and play video clips for your audience in real time, as well, which helps if demo’s are part of your plan. If Mogulus’ service and bandwidth can keep up with the potential popularity of Procaster, I see this app becoming a standard tool of the social web trade. It’s only available for Windows right now, but the site says a Mac version is on the way.

{Text Kindly Copied from DownloadSquad}

One of the many Steaming services out there includes Mogulus and this allows you to broadcast live video to many people at once the internet. On this review – we shall try and go though some of the reasons why Mogulus stands over and above the other streaming services out there, what it has to offer and touch on the advertising side such as adverts on your stream.

The interface seemed to me quite complicated to fully understand what it was all about and what this service is trying to do is both dispense with 3rd party software to add various effects as well as give TV like qualities over the production part. You can build up your library of video footage from various places such as YouTube, podcasting and your own library on your computer. This gives you a selection of pre-made video content such as Adverts for example or a pre-recorded part of your show.

The other very cool aspect is the ability to log in on various computers with a Webcam and have them all show up on the master console – this allows you to switch to a different View and/or person as requested by placing it in the Queue. I tested this part out and I was hoping that one single Microphone might be used (the streaming computer) but it switched inputs as I moved around the Camera’s.

As for the recording Part – there is only so many hours allowed on the Free account – talking of which this is now broken into 3 different area’s:

** Free but not Authenticated as follows:

To begin, effective February 23, 2009, all UNVERIFIED Mogulus Free channels will be limited to an audience of 50 concurrent viewers and will not be listed at www.mogulus.com. If you apply and we verify your channel before or after February 23, your channel will support unlimited concurrent viewers and will continue to appear on the Mogulus channel guide.

** Free & Authenticated – unlimited users but adverts etc.

** Pro Account:

1 Pro Channel – 25GIG Month Storage, 25Gig Month Bandwidth – $350 Month

10 Pro Channels – 200GIG month, 200 GIG Month Bandwidth – $1250 Month

It allows you th host to specify what section your channel fits in and in turn people can actually find you by looking in the right section. The Quality is very good, its a Shame the chat is not IRC Server based and not good to manage – but the rest is fine.

If you combined a Few machines logged in, some Software such as Camtwist plsu some pre-recorded show content, no reason why you could not make a very good show.