review: Livestream Broadcaster

Livestream Broadcaster is an exceptionally easy-toconfigure-and-use live encoder that produced very good quality over a range of relevant band widths. The only significant negatives are that the unit doesn't work with the older Livestream system and doesn't currently offer adaptive streaming, though Livestream promises to address the latter concern in the near future.

Out With the Old Livestream, In With the New

By way of background, Livestream is a live streaming service provider, much like Ustream and Justin.tv. If you have a webcam or camera, you can broadcast live to the world at no charge, with advertisements paying the freight. For a minimum monthly fee, you can lose the advertisements. For a background on live streaming service providers, check out "Ustream, Justin.tv, Livestream, and Bambuser Streaming Unplugged" at http://go2sm.com/ livestreamingservices. For a more extensive Livestream review, check out "Livestream Review: Strong Customization and Social Media Support" at http://go2sm.com/livestream.

Livestream is in the middle of transitioning from a mature, channel-based service to a more nascent, event -based service. The channel-based service presented a producer with a static channel page and URL that never changed, and all live broadcasts occurred within that page. However, the live stream could be embedded elsewhere, such as into your own homepage, with a well-featured player with lots of social media support and access to your library of videos. Mobile support was also very well-developed for the channelbased service, with apps for iOS and browserbased playback on some Android devices.

The new Livestream is event-based, and each event has a separate page and URL. The experience is much richer and more participatory, as you can upload still images and videos and make bloglike posts on the event page. Live streams cannot be embedded during the live broadcast, but after the event, Livestream converts the broadcast into an ondemand file that you can embed. While the live streams are compatible with most mobile devices, the on-demand streams are not. The new service is also much, much cheaper than the old service, with unlimited streaming for $45/month. (Check out an interview with CEO and co-founder Max Haot at http://bcove.me/ Ir85zpf4 for a brief demo.)

Livestream Broadcaster is a stand-alone hardware device (Figure 1) that works with the new, but not the old, Livestream....