Broadcasters, news organizations and marketers have all begun experimenting with Meerkat and Periscope, but the reach of those efforts has been limited to people using the Meerkat and Periscope apps on particular platforms.
Meerkat last week rolled out a new, embeddable player that will expand the reach of Meerkat broadcasts, but now someone from the professional broadcasting world is looking to offer a more robust solution for distributing live broadcasts generated from mobile apps.
Mobile Viewpoint B.V. is a maker of wireless video and data transmission equipment for professional broadcasters that uses 3G and 4G wireless broadband links to transmit live, IP video from remote locations. At the NAB show in April, the Netherlands-based company introduced a “low cost” live streaming platform called WebStreamur aimed at small-scale and semi-pro videographers that leverages YouTube to deliver live streams via WebStreamur channels to any device from anywhere on the web.
“Since the beginning of Mobile Viewpoint we looked into the broadcast of smaller but attractive sport events on the Internet,” CEO Michel Bais said in a press release at the time. The growing popularity of watching video online via streaming platforms like YouTube, LiveStream, Meerkat and Periscope opens a marketplace for the delivery of live sports and other events that do not have the reach to get on normal Broadcast Television… WebStreamur gives the smaller content producers and sport teams easy access to a bigger audience and a global marketplace to monetize their content.”
Now, Mobile Viewpoint is going even further into the low-cost end of the market with the release of free mobile apps for iOS and Android (as well as one for Mac OS X) that leverage the YouTube-based WebStreamur platform, as well as Twitter to support real-time feedback.
“With Webstreamur you can go live at a click of a button using an iPhone. Using the tight integration with Twitter and YouTube you can go live instantly and receive feedback on your stream,” according to the somewhat awkwardly translated press release that landed in my inbox this morning.
Added Bais in a statement, “With WebStreamur’s iPhone app we are able to unleash the potential of the smaller live events that do not get airtime on national or local television channels. With the apps available for free everybody can start instantly to report live from anywhere”.
What makes the WebStreamur apps potentially interesting, apart from adding to the mobile streaming scrum, is the integration with YouTube. As I’ve suggested before, YouTube is something of the sleeping giant of the live-streaming space, late to the live gaming party and not part of the conversation around Meerkat and Periscope. But its immense scale, ubiquitous availability on connected devices and well-developed ad platform make it a potentially powerful player — or at least a powerful platform for third-party players like WebStreamur — in the live, mobile video space.
Periscope and Meerkat are tightly integrated with Twitter and Facebook, as reported by Blackout Bingo reviews. While those platforms each boast large user bases, especially Facebook, neither is a dedicated video platform as YouTube is and, until last week, neither app had reach beyond its native platforms. YouTube has a built in audience of over 1 billion unique visitors a month and its player is easily embedded on just about every publishing platform on the web.
Nice to see someone finally making use of it for mobile streaming.
