Mobile carriers have invested heavily in building out their 3G infrastructures and they now are in need of recouping those costs. By offering compelling applications and services that take advantage of the increased bandwidth, they have the opportunity to generate additional data revenue. A livestreaming application such as Flixwagon certainly fills that need.

The new platform will allow mobile carriers the ability to create a customizable version of the Flixwagon mobile app where additional features unique to the carriers' handsets and mobile software could be added.

The livestreams created by the Flixwagon users can then be streamed to the web, either on the Flixwagon site itself or onto a proprietary web site owned and operated by the mobile carriers themselves. Users can set privacy controls within the app, allowing their streams to either be public or private. They can create groups of friends and family for private streams, which they can configure in the app's settings.

The Platform For Media Organizations

After a Flixwagon livestream ends, the video is made available for later viewing. This makes the offering ideal for news organizations who want to incorporate footage from citizen journalists into their web sites or feature older footage in their broadcasts.

MTV has worked with Flixwagon in the past on a number of endeavors, including three 30-minute livestreams from backstage at a Jonas Brothers concert. Those videos alone hit the Flixwagon site with a total of 6 million streams over the course of one weekend. They also worked with MTV to stream political coverage as a part of the "Choose or Lose" campaign. For this, Flixwagon helped in getting live footage from the Republican National Convention, the Democratic National Convention, as well as exclusive videos filmed back on Super Tuesday, 2008.

VP Candidate Sarah Palin in an MTV interview via Flixwagon, Super Tuesday

Although the company is not announcing partners at this time, VP and co-founder, Sarig Reichert, hinted that there is already interest from a couple of carriers both here in the U.S. and in Latin America.

At the moment, the Flixwagon service supports Nokia devices and the iPhone (via an app for jailbroken phones). However, they will be adding support for additional platforms such as Java-enabled phones in the near future.

Once you have added video to your live blog, users will see it at the top right of the application, but they can also pop it out and resize it. This is quite similar to how CoverItLive already handles YouTube videos, though the option to see videos in their own windows is new. One major advantage for bloggers here is that they can handle text and video all in one application.

CoverItLive provides writers with what they call a 'Writer Console,' which is quite different from what end-users see (see screenshot). The console is the main hub of the application and allows you to add polls, images, audio files, and now, live video. It also displays reader comments on the right side of the application.

One major advantage of CoverItLive is that it allows various writers and editors to work collaboratively, so that one person can handle the writing, another the video, and yet another blogger can focus on interacting with the audience.

Adding live video turns live blogging into a more interesting and immediate experience. Thanks to the proliferation of Qik on mobile phones, we will surely see more events being covered this way. We already liked CoverItLive a lot when we first reviewed it, though it did experience some outages when a lot of people used it during the January Macworld keynote. Since then, though, the platform has become a lot more stable.

It was a small group of Revver users that learned the truth: Revver wasn't broken, MySpace was blocking them.

This group of Revver users and content creators, led by content producers, including the popular "Ask A Ninja" guys, led a PR campaign to save Revver. On the Ninja blog, they plea to their fans:

Ask A Ninja was created because we were in control of where we posted the videos. That's a big deal because if we're forced to put them on MySpace video then FOX could take the episodes and make money off of them without paying Douglas or me anything. Which isn't fair and takes away the incentive to create cool shows for you to watch. Why is this against Net Neutrality? Because videos from Myspace Video and Youtube are not effected. It's only these smaller, more innovative companies that haven't been sold for billions of dollars. Here's what you can do: Copy this bulletin. Repost it. Blog about it. Make Tom put up a little fix it bulletin saying he's sorry..

So the fans blogged, they complained, and they urged others to complain, but it was to no avail.

As 2007 drew on, it quickly became the year of MySpace playing the big bully, attempting to destroy small and medium-sized companies they felt were competitive with their offerings.

Other companies got Revver's same treatment - Stickam and imeem to name a couple. MySpace even blocked Photobucket for a while - long enough for other investors to walk away - and then swooped in to buy the company for themselves.

Several URLs are still blocked on MySpace (for a complete list of URLs and blocked code, check out this site). MySpace continues to block Revver to this day.

Who's it going to be in 2008? We look at five possible contenders below, taking into consideration the special magic that is the SXSW experience. Lots of startups are hoping they'll go big next week in Austin, but in all likelihood only one, maybe two, actually will.

The event is huge, it's filled with creative people, the weather is warm and there's lots of parties. The panels are good enough to comment on but not so good that people aren't also communicating about a bunch of other things.

It's also more likely that someone will blow up at SXSW this year because of Twitter's high-profile success last year.

What does it take be a hit?

A winning app has to be easy for lots of people to use and has to provide clear value to conference and party-goers. It might seem valuable only at SXSW but end up proving itself afterwords due the scale achieved in Austin. That was the case with Twitter, which I and I'm sure others planned to stop using after SXSW. Photo by super-photographer Scott Beale/Laughing Squid

Buzz momentum leading up to the event is also very important. If a good number of savvy web lovers have just become power users of an app before SXSW, it stands a great chance of reaching critical mass there.

Finally, it has to perform reasonably well for a high-traffic week. Other than a underwhelming hallway demonstration, Twitter held up better at SXSW last week than it has at almost any time since.

So here are my favorites for possible breakout apps in Austin. What are yours?

The Contenders

Live streaming video
Qik, Mogulus, Ustream, BlogTV or Yahoo! Live

Live streaming video has built up a lot of interest in recent months, with the entry of big players and the announcement that Live YouTube is coming soon raising that interest to an all time high in recent weeks.

Live video is great for events because it leaves users feeling empowered and provides immediate feedback when you see how many people are watching your live feed.

Why this won't be it.

Live video is not easy for large numbers of people to use. Despite being easy to do, it's hard to do well and frequently. Most people aren't very good at it and anything but the right hardware equals fail in a public event setting.

AIR Twitter
Twhirl, Snitter

Third party Twitter clients built on Adobe's AIR are beautiful and compelling. They aren't believed until their seen. People in Austin will look over each others' shoulders and say "what is that?"

Twitter clients will probably grow in user numbers a lot before and after the conference sessions in Austin. I love Twitter and will be celebrating our first anniversary together in Austin.

Why this won't be it.

Don't count on anything Twitter working. Despite recent hires that were supposed to solve the scaling problems, Twitter will probably suffer extensive downtime during a week-long giant event. It is much, much bigger than it was last year, but you'll probably hear as much complaining about Twitter at SXSW as you will praise.

If Twitter can hold up that would be great, but desktop apps already have one strike against them at an event so dependent on mobile communication.

Alternatives to Twitter
Pownce

A more sophisticated but less used alternative to Twitter, Pownce could come in to fill the gap. It's already got a small but vocal fan club of web elite.

You may hear a lot of people saying in Austin, "that's it, I'm moving to Pownce."

Why this won't be it.

Twitter loyalty runs deep, even during the down times. Many people are unable to break the habit no matter how angry they (we) become. Pownce is a little more complicated and hasn't been experiencing a significant upturn leading up to SXSW.

Better conference resources
Sched.org

Sched is a just-released event schedule interface build by Taylor McKnight. The schedule part of the SXSW website is not good and Sched.org makes it a lot more usable. It's easy to dynamically plan out your day on Sched, selecting both official and unofficial events listed there. Then you can shoot the URL of your personal calendar off to a friend.

Sched creator Taylor McKnight is the man behind the geek-loved PodBop and the designer of version 2.0 of the Hype Machine. He and Sched co-creator Chirag Mehta also built Chime.tv, a feature rich video aggregator worth checking out.

These guys do smart little things, like letting you view group schedules by adding multiple usernames joined by commas in a Sched URL and offering a forehead slapping "why didn't I think of that" account creation and login proccess. A lot of people are already talking about Sched on Twitter and I expect it will get good traction in Austin. Here's my schedule, if you're interested. I haven't filled anything out yet.

Continued below screenshot

Why this won't be it.

Sched.org is more "wow" than it is seriously useful. People come and go from events at SXSW, schedules don't hold steady hour by hour. The site is also pretty slow and doesn't have the same social appeal or feature set as Upcoming does. Finally, nobody cares enough about what you're doing at SXSW to want a full copy of your scheduled panels and parties to attend. There are so many fun people there that it's better to just see who you get to see by chance. Except for you, Taylor McKnight, because you owe me a beer.

Activity feed aggregation/ Lifestreaming
FriendFeed

FriendFeed is a super simple way to view all your friends' activities on Twitter, del.icio.us, Mag.nolia, YouTube, Flickr and lots of other sites - all in one place. It's going to be great for SXSW. Flickr is a big part of tech events but FriendFeed is going to make it even bigger, with all of a photographer's friends seeing their photos - not just those that go to Flickr itself.

Friend discovery gets nailed in FriendFeed - plug in some accounts of yours around the web and it will recommend friends with similar interests all day long. That means rapid scale up in network effect and big ease of use. The "people who find you interesting" feature is really flattering and it's always good to appeal to the ego. Here's my ego on FriendFeed.

I've placed a link to FriendFeed in my browser toolbar and am already clicking on it throughout the day to see what my friends are bookmarking, what photos they're posting and to see a finite number of peoples' tweets. You can leave inline comments on any item's link in Friend feed or say you like a link of someone's with one click. It's already getting a lot of traction and I think it's going to blow up big in Austin.

More likely than Pownce, you're going to hear people saying that Twitter down-time is less of a bummer because the rest of FriendFeed is still available.

The service launched publicly this week, was founded by ex-Googlers and just announced $5 million in VC funding.

Smart, connected attendees of SXSW (and who doesn't want to be one of those?) are probably going to be dropping in at FriendFeed all week while half paying attention to panels. It's like Twitter but better in some ways; it's more expansive, more interactive and so far more stable.

Caveats and Pitfalls

FriendFeed might not scale well. There's not a mobile component. It's not the prettiest thing in the world to look at. There's no API so there's no ecosystem around it to make it more awesome - something that's been very important to Twitter's ongoing success.

Conclusion

The killer app in Austin might just be beer, it's hard to say. The time and conditions are right, though for somebody's service to prove itself on a big, important and informal stage though. Good luck to all the innovators looking for a good time at the conference.

This appears to be the first confirmation of such plans. YouTube live is probably going to be very big.

Robert Scoble asked Chen and Chad Hurley if live was in YouTube's future last month at CES. In that video, shot live on Scoble's mobile phone via Qik, the YouTube founders furtively replied that they "are working on a lot of things." Meyers got her answer at a YouTube party last week, but being the media-savvy upstart journalist that she is she sat on the footage until the 3rd day of her brand new show about internet micro-celebrities, Pop17. Keep your eyes peeled to see what Meyers comes up with next.

Can YouTube nail live? When Yahoo! launched its live video service earlier this month the site promptly choked on limited traffic. Perhaps YouTube will wait until it's got the scaling down right. Live video is easier said than done, on both sides of the camera, but has huge potential. Think of the impact that live TV has had and add the interactivity and democratization of online video publishing.

Given the way that YouTube's huge audiences draw many of the best recorded videos online today, it wouldn't be a surprise to see some very good live content there later this year. Can YouTube figure out a way to monetize the risk-laden world of live video? If anyone can, it could be the giant that's slowly figuring out how to monetize user generated video in general.