Live Streaming Video Sure Has Changed in 4 Years

In 2005, when we created the live video sensation of the year with the Hornby Island Eagle Nest Camera, there simply were no live video services capable of helping us make money from what turned out to be 40,000 live streams on for over 4 months solid. The technology and techniques simply didn't exist.

All such streaming video shows at that time were limited to "pre" and "post" roll advertising insertions - aimed at episodic (relatively short shows done daily/weekly etc.) or file archives. That model didn't work for our camera because, although there could be, and was, a pre-roll when someone joined the stream, there was never any post-roll because the stream never stopped - and the length of time someone could watch was measured in days and months, not hours and minutes so the potential cost per viewer was measured in tens and hundreds of dollars rather than pennies and dimes.

Flash forward to today - and there are several companies whose business model is exactly what we needed - live insertion of overlay advertising onto non-stop video streams. Four short years and a new industry has exploded onto the market.

Today I'm shopping around for a hosting service for David Ingram and my new weekly show. Yes, it's episodic, but many of the services I've found will let you broadcast 24x7 streams of your hummingbird feeder or your puppies playing and sleeping - and yes, your news and views program. They (the service providers) don't care what it is your stream consists of - as long as you attract people who don't mind ads showing up on the bottom of the screen every so often.

But what is the economic trade-off with such services? Should we host our own? We've been doing this for the first year as we have done the financial shows - mostly because many of these shows were paid advertising - so our costs were covered. Going to a strictly ad and donation based revenue model means we would have to somehow cover our bandwidth use ourselves even if we got no donations/ads.

Back when I first got started with David Hancock and the Hornby project I did some calculations on what a live stream took in the way of network costs per viewer.

A stream at about 350Kbits/second (the rate we were set to use) will use something close to 100 Gigabytes of network bandwidth in a month. At that rate we felt we needed to purchase bandwidth at a cost that would allow us to sell it to viewers - or advertisers - at about $10-$15/month. Remember, this is 24x7 viewing and the advertising paradigm for live video had not been tested or perfected. We were looking at pay-for-view mostly.

At the time the best we could find was about $50 per megabit of bandwidth per month - and 1 megabit is about the equivalent of 3x350Kbps streams - so each stream would have been about $17/month. To get this rate we would have had to pre-pay for a minimum of 1000 Mbps or 1 Gbps - at a cost of $50,000/month whether we had any viewers (paying) or sold any advertising. Just not an option for what we expected would be a few hundred at most people in various universities around the world who might be interested in such a "paint-drying" stream of video.

As it turned out, we got bandwidth from several places, including a donation from Microsoft at one point (we were using Microsoft Windows Media Server at that point - and stressing it hard enough that they got involved because they were intrigued by how my friend Ed Clunn was managing to do this) as well as from a company making an entry into the streaming video market. Fortunately we (David and I) didn't have to fund this ourselves.

The company that did most of the streaming took a bath on the costs - didn't make enough from the ads, and ended up getting out of the market.

Pretty much the same thing happened the next year.

The third year, the newly formed Hancock Wildlife Foundation funded its own server and limited the numbers viewing to only what we could afford - about 90 at any time.

This past year Hancock Wildlife Foundation hooked up with WildEarth.TV and run via the facilities of Zaplive.TV. WildEarth has made a business of pulling in all manner of wildlife video feeds and shares the revenue from the streaming ads - a great way of doing business for a small foundation.

But what about for a budding live interview and call-in setup like Around the World? What else is there out there that we can use - and hopefully make some money with? We know how to make our shows interesting - and we know how to get people to watch them - but the work of finding and dealing with advertisers is something best done in bulk with automated facilities currently not easily managed by individuals - although there are pieces of this pie available too that I'll go into in another piece.

Well, if you put "free live video streaming" into Google the first one that pops up is Ustream.TV - and David's son, Mitchell, was using it a couple of nights ago from his bedroom - and got all manner of people interacting with him. I signed up yesterday and have to say that I'm sure impressed with how far such a facility has come in the past couple of years. I've also just signed up with Zaplive.TV - but while I'm waiting for the confirmation password I've been browsing their site - and found that despite my language choice (English) there are many screens that are in German (it is a German company) so I'll have to see if this is something that is fixed if I use IE on Windows as I'm using Firefox on Linux currently.

I've also had an account on Blip.TV where we've hosted many of David's previously aired TV shows. They are oriented toward file uploads only at this time, but are not limited to 10 minutes like YouTube is, at least until you earn their "Partner" award.

Of course all such sites that host "free" video have their "gotchas" - such as Ustream's License Grant section of their Terms of Service:

(i) License Grant. Ustream.tv does not claim ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by uploading, streaming, submitting, emailing, posting, publishing or otherwise transmitting any User Submission to Ustream.tv or on the Site, you hereby grant Ustream.tv a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, perpetual and irrevocable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works based on, perform, display, publish, distribute, transmit, broadcast and otherwise exploit such User Submissions in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed, including without limitation on the Site and third party websites. You represent and warrant that you own or have the necessary licenses, rights, consents and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses to Ustream.tv. Ustream.tv will own all right, title and interest in and to all derivative works and compilations of User Submissions that are created by Ustream.tv, including all worldwide intellectual property rights therein. You agree to execute and deliver such documents and provide all assistance reasonably requested by Ustream.tv to give to Ustream.tv the full benefit of the rights granted to Ustream.tv by you.

So... do David and I want to sign away these rights just so we don't have to pay for our own streaming bandwidth? It's something we have to decide. The other services have pretty much the same type of license requirements. Only if we use our own paid-for bandwidth do we retain all rights.

Of course the streamed version of our shows is not the only, or the best, version of most of them. We run a local hi-res archive server that captures the mixed video and audio for later mix-down and re-use. The stream carrier only gets the flash-video version, not the MPEG2 version. The other thing is that with the huge numbers of streams these sites host, most of their 're-publishing' - is completely automatic and only helps us by building the market for our show. On balance, I think this is the way we'll go.

I'll write more on what facilities each of these servers have - in the mean time, tune in to the show each Wednesday evening from 6PM onward, Pacific time, at www.david-ingram.com (for now - maybe also or instead from right here on www.digital-rag.com)

richard