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Conference Broadcasting

A Live Internet TV Channel For Your Business

By Dan Baldwin, 8/17/9

Livestream at www.Livestream.com provides a live video web stream service to users who can connect a video camera to a computer that is connected to a broadband Internet connection. This gives the Livestream user the ability to create their own live TV channel. The service also creates a viewable archive of any content you originally stream live. The service is either free (ad supported) or premium where the users pay based on the bandwidth used.

I stumbled across the Livestream service when I received an email newsletter from RVtravel.com that promoted their 2-hour live broadcast this past Saturday. Well I just happened to see the email during the live broadcast so I clicked on it and it was just as advertised - a guy sitting in front of an RV talking about RVs. The most amazing thing about the broadcast was that 180 people other than me were watching at the same time!

As most of you know I love video as a way to transmit information to our audience but I do all mine in a recorded format so it can be easily indexed for the benefit of the viewer who only wants to view a certain bit of the content.

The Livestream service seems perfect for any sort of business that needs to put out a corporate message to a large audience. I would think that investor's board meetings or other formal conference calls could easily go for this TA type format. During the live broadcast it was possible to "chat" in questions to be answered live.

Will TA be using Livestream anytime soon to produce a "Telecom TV" channel? We'd love to but not anytime soon. We currently have about 30 recorded video pieces we're backlogged in producing. But if and when we had to do anything live we sure would!

The only caution TA might have about using this service to host all our video archives is that we're quite possessive of our content and want to make sure we have direct possession of at least copies of our content . We've looked at other 3rd-party content hosts that let you create and distribute audio & video content through them but you can't download a backup copy of the content. That's a bad deal because then you can never leave that service provider unless you want to recreate all your content. But if your content does not lend itself to needing to be archived (think daily "weather" reports) then not having backup content copies is not an issue.

TA is forwarding this page to our conferencing vendor members to see if they are going to provide a similar service and for their opinion as to whether they see Livestream or similar services as an infringement into the conferencing business.

What do you think?

Send your comments to Dan@TelecomAssociation.com and we'll post them here. If you prefer you can leave an audio message at 951-200-4144 and we'll post your audio response.

Click one or both the following links to see how this service might be promoted by a telecom agent or channel partner on their own end-user facing web site.   Detail page   951TEL home page