Get a Life: New Tools Put Lifecasting Within Anyone's Reach

The Social Aspect of Lifecasting
It is precisely this social interaction that enables people like Jeff Hibbard to broadcast their videos and build a group of subscribers, as well as link their content to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. This social aspect of self-casting is particularly important. In fact, Hyde thinks this is the next logical step for the industry.

"For us the next step is basically building on the aquarium model I described before—but on a larger scale," Hyde says. We see self-casting at the center of communities of common interest—moving from clear verticals (like reef-keeping) into more general areas, like entertainment brands or politics. Live broadcasting takes this kind of social networking on a level—because it brings people together at the same time around the same event."

Roy says the ability to text while broadcasting also creates an interaction between the videographer and people watching the video. "We are finding people are using Qik to broadcast what they are doing around lifecasting to a blog and creating an interaction while they are doing that. While I’m streaming live, people can chat, and that shows on my phone. I’m sharing what I’m seeing and people can have an engaged experience while I’m doing that," Roy says. For him it’s about sharing this experience that you are seeing through your cell phone camera with family and friends (although he says it can certainly move beyond that to other applications). Using Qik, you can also broadcast straight to YouTube, Justin.tv, or your blog, not just to the Qik website. This enables users to share the video feed (and saved videos) in any social way they choose.

Flixwagon works in a similar fashion, Reichert explains. "Once you start broadcasting, people get notified in email or Twitter. They can see a link to your video stream and can chat live. If anyone misses the live broadcast, all videos are saved. You can also embed a widget for your own website, blog or social site, so you can watch from our site but also any site where you choose to put the widget," Reichert says.

Reichert adds that his company is not only giving social aspects to individuals in this fashion but also is experimenting with different ways to use the technology with partners such as MTV, which they connected with on Super Tuesday. "What MTV did during Super Tuesday was to equip 20 reporters with Nokia cell phones with our application installed and, through our service, they were broadcasting live to MTV.com, … providing a unique street-level view of Super Tuesday," Reichert says. He explains that MTV promoted it heavily on its TV properties, and viewers could go online and vote for the best videos. The most popular videos were aired on TV to attract more people back to the websites. "It created a lot of traffic, which we think was the first mobile-to-web broadcast on such a scale," he says.

In fact, Rosenbaum thinks in some ways, it’s more accurate to refer to what his company is doing as "community-casting" because it provides the tools to build a community through video very quickly, just as Little Bear and Geronimo did with Native American Tube. "I think community is critical. I think it’s why the community works actively to rate, review, and organize video. If you compare [a Magnify.net community] to YouTube, if you enter a search in YouTube, you would get some of these videos, and some porn and spam. There is no filter because there is no active community group organizing the videos," he says.

Privacy and Content Ownership Issues
As we have seen on YouTube and other video sharing sites, when you can broadcast video, privacy and ownership issues do come into play. If you can broadcast anything from anywhere, you could, for example, send a video of a concert you are watching to your site and violate the ownership rights of the musician or the record company. In December 2007, for example, Warner Music Group ordered YouTube to take down several cell phone videos of the Led Zeppelin reunion concert in London, claiming copyright infringement.

Both Qik and Flixwagon have privacy modes, so video you are sending to your account stays private until you wish to make it public. Reichert says that when it comes to privacy and copyright issues, this is something that any video or picture site faces; it’s up to the company to state the terms of use clearly in the end-user license agreement. In addition, Reichert says his company has filters set up for inappropriate content.

"We are filtering content and making sure [that inappropriate content] doesn’t appear live. We are also relying on the community to mark content as inappropriate. If we detect it, we take it down and warn broadcasters," Reichert says. He adds that his company has an advantage because it can track content back to a cell phone number. "If you think about it, today people can stream live from web cams as well, but with cell phones, you have bigger enforcement leverage because at the end of the day, you can get to a specific cell phone number, and that’s something you cannot always do from the [open] web."

Show Me the Money
At the end of the day, all of these companies are providing these services mostly for free because they think there is a way to make money doing this. Otherwise, it would be hard to justify the investment in programming to create the services and servers to capture and store video online. Chris Brogan, an industry watcher who is VP of strategy at CrossTech Media, thinks we are still in the early stages and that it’s going to take a while to shake out how to make money. "We are still in the gee-whiz tool stage. We are still novelty streaming at this point. I think more people are trying to understand and to grow their understanding of media and delivering good media," he says.