The Ustream integration will let Ning users embed both live and recorded video into their sites. In addition to the video content, the new feature will also make available live chats so that people watching the event can also participate.

Ning boasts over 2 million Ning networks, and the video broadcasting integration is well-suited for many of these, particularly ones associated with education. The Ustream feature is only available, however, to Ning Plus and Pro subscribers (not to the Ning Minis, which are free for educators).

But with the possibility to broadcast tutorials or workshops or discussions, it does seem as though this video integration will make upgrading to a paid subscription very appealing for many users of the social network.

The company put up a post on its blog this evening with screenshots and details of the launch, but pulled the post, probably because the app isn't live yet in the iTunes store. None the less, you can see the screenshots and highlights of the new version below.

Highlights from the pending UStream release include:

• Broadcasting and viewing will now finally be possible through the same single app. UStream previously offered live mobile broadcasting through one app (last updated in November) and viewing other peoples' live shows through another (last updated in July). Now there will be just one app for both. It's much more attractive than either the broadcaster or the viewer, too.


• Featured content and sorting by categories. It's hard to find good content on the UStream app, but the screenshot of featured live and recorded shows indicates the company is set to overcome this major hurdle in making the app worth using. In testing the old app just minutes ago, I was able to view live chatter between astronauts climbing around on the outside of the space station - on my phone! I was also able to see a well-endowed woman disrobe in front of a radio microphone while voices from off-camera shouted in Spanish about Wikipedia. Both live broadcasts truly were marvels of the modern age. Featured content will be a big improvement though, presuming there's enough good things to feature.


• Users can now log-in with Facebook or Twitter, in addition to their UStream accounts. That's a very smart change.


• Broadcasters will now be able to run polls from the app.


• Subscribers can sign up for push notifications for channels or events of interest being broadcast live.

Can changes like these help UStream move beyond the topless astronaut crowd? Time will tell, but they sure look like big improvements to me. I like the idea of being able to view and broadcast live video from my phone. I'll test the app and report back on performance once it's live.

The move can mean great things for both broadcasters and viewers, as it offers a way to monetize streaming video while also bringing content to the site that might not otherwise be available.

Currently, the program is only open to a few select broadcasters, but will be accepting applications soon. Ad-free broadcasting will become available in early November.

What do you think - would you pay a small fee for a high-quality broadcast of a conference you couldn't attend, but wanted to watch part of anyways? Might the feature attract higher-profile broadcasters that want a quick and simple way to monetize live video?

But imagine what will happen to mobile streaming video as the next generation of high-speed wireless networks and devices become the norm.

But wireless infrastructure is about to take a leap forward as two so-called 4G technologies - LTE (Long Term Evolutions) and WiMAX - roll out. Sprint and its partner Clearwire plan to cover 120 million customers with high speed, Internet-anywhere WiMAX access by 2010, a technology that with upgrades could rival LTE speeds.

Mobile Web use mirrors fixed Web use, said Joel Brand, VP of product management at Bytemobile. About 75% of 3G Web users are connecting with laptops and netbooks, he said, with the rest accessing on smartphones. A full third of video on these devices is delivered by YouTube, he said, another third is from adult content sites and the last third comes from a broad mix of sources.

Next generation networks will certainly encourage the popularity of video, but it will probably also change the way we watch. For short, expedient, low-definition videos, YouTube is king. But higher mobile Web speeds will encourage users to seek longer, high-definition videos from services like Netflix and Hulu.

Higher speeds also mean live-streaming services like Ustream, Justin.tv, Livestream and Qik become more a lot more usable. Faster speeds will encourage individual users to stream more video, made even easier because so many users accessing via laptops or with Apple devices that have front-facing cameras. Livestreaming sites will also see huge opportunities for broadcasting live events like concerts, sports games or newscasts to users who can't watch at home in front of their TVs.

The next generation of wireless networks will surely see more users accessing video - but it's likely that a lower percentage of it will be from YouTube. Do you stream video on your phone? How do you see yourself using video as mobile wireless speeds get faster?

Photo by Giorgio Montersino

Ustream put out a statement today saying that the subpoena actually came earlier this year, and that Ustream has fully complied with its demands.

The mixed martial arts championship alleged that one user from a single IP address uploaded two events that drew 36,000 and 78,000 non-paying viewers, respectively, representing a "significant loss of revenue" to UFC and their mobile, online, cable and satellite distribution partners. The events cost $44.95 each or $55.95 for the HD version via cable and satellite providers and official online outlets.

"I can't wait to go after the thieves that are stealing our content," UFC President Dana White said in the statement. "This is a fight we will not lose."

Zuffa LLC, the UFC's parent company, cites a section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that allows copyright owners to order service providers to disclose the identity of subscribers who allegedly engage in copyright infringement. The company has aggressively pursued pirates in the past, settling over 500 lawsuits last month and testifying before Congress.

Ustream seems prepared to full comply with Zuffa's demands - the UFC actually has an official channel on Ustream, where it broadcasts footage from behind the scenes as well as some live events.

Justin.tv, which also received subpoenas, has remained silent on the subpoenas so far but has moved to protect copyright owners in the past.

There are a number of ways people are keeping track of the tragedy that is the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the result of an off shore oil well explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. Now the largest oil spill in U.S. history and ranking highly on the worldwide chart as well, the event has resulted in one of the most horrific environmental disasters of all time.

Every news outlet offers round-the-clock news on the latest containment efforts, BP provides its own live streams, social media sites are filled with tweets, status updates, photos and more, government agencies and sites offer their own resources and countless charities and other non-profit organizations are soliciting donations and volunteer assistance. It's so much information, that's it's almost overwhelming - where do you even begin?

Oilaholic: Real-Time Web Meets Traditional Media

Oilaholic is definitely a good starting place. The site taps into APIs from Facebook, Twitter and Flickr to deliver real-time updates from social media sites, and organizes them site alongside other more traditional resources and links. A ticker at the top even scrolls through breaking news on the topic, like today's BP apology campaign, the "top hat" capping attempt and the flu-like symptoms now being reported by some Gulf Coast workers.

Meanwhile, below, the live Twitter stream constantly refreshes and the plumes spew in live video footage. On a second tab, public Facebook updates replace Twitter's stream, but the rest of the page remains the same. Other tabs focus solely on news headlines from top sites (like CNN, WSJ, NPR, MSNBC, Reuters, HuffPo and others), oil spill photos from around the Web - including those on Flickr and those being tweeted via Twitpic - and oil spill videos from YouTube.

In our opinion, Oilaholic isn't just a nifty mashup. Thanks to the links to non-social media resources it's actually one of the most comprehensive services for tracking oil spill news everywhere on the Web, whether real-time or not.

The new oil-tracking service is hosted on a subdomain of Jamtopia, a music-focused site with live concert videos, live streams, photos and more. Like Jamtopia, Oilaholic is a product of Mashware, a company that specializes in Web-based mashups like those for Xbox, iPod and even the robot dinosaur, Pleo.

(Thanks to Programmable Web for the tip)

San Francisco's Justin.tv announced today that almost one and a half million people have downloaded the company's live-video-stream-viewing app to their iPhones in the first month it's been available. From Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech, to the Future of Money conference, to a lot of content I don't care to watch, Justin.tv is definitely getting traction. This isn't the only company fast finding a lot of consumer interest in mobile video streaming, either.

The point is: People love live streaming video to mobile handsets.

Justin.tv said today that it has made major stability updates to its app (sometimes these things still feel like tin cans with string between them), and added push notifications to alert users when their favorite live shows are broadcasting. The iPhone app already contributes about 20% of the company's total new account sign-ups.

We don't know how many downloads the Ustream app has seen since it first entered the iTunes app store and was featured prominently there, but if we assume that the same one half of one percent of users will have rated the Ustream app as have rated the Justin.tv app, then Ustream would have seen well more than 11 million downloads so far. Presumably if the app had in fact passed 10 million by now, we would have heard about it.

The moral of the story, though, is that live streaming video sent to mobile phones is here and people like it. Live video broadcasting from mobile is much, much less popular of course, but content creation is always less popular than consumption.

It's exciting to imagine how a more mature mobile, live-streaming video market will look. I'm ready to watch all kinds of things happen live on my phone.

Mobile Roadie Powers the Official LeWeb 09 iPhone App

In addition to the Ustream partnership, Mobile Roadie also announced that it will power the official LeWeb 09 application (iTunes link). This annual conference in Paris will kick off next Wednesday. The push-enabled LeWeb app will feature live streaming video, an updated conference schedule and maps. The app also includes a list of conference speakers and attendees, as well as a chat room and a Twitter aggregator for LeWeb related tweets. Users will also be able to use the app to post their own photos from conference sessions.

The following video gives you a good impression of what the app is capable of:

RWW at LeWeb

ReadWriteWeb will be out in full force at this year's LeWeb. I will cover the conference as part of the Traveling Geeks team and Dana Oshiro will be there with the Social Media Club House.

TinyChat.tv's interface will feel very familiar if you used the regular TinyChat before.

Room owners can customize the look and feel of their rooms and decide if they want to force users to sign in with their Twitter or Facebook accounts. One feature we really liked on TinyChat was that users could type a random URL (tinychat.com/12345) and the service would automatically create a room with this URL. This feature hasn't been enabled on TinyChat.tv yet, but TinyChat's co-founder Dan Blake tells us that it will come back soon.

For $9.95 per month, users can also buy a pro membership that allows them to set passwords for rooms and stream higher quality video.

For Developers: Free Streaming with TinyChat API

For developers, TinyChat now offers a comprehensive free application programming interface (API) that makes it easy for developers to create their own Ustream clones. Indeed, TinyChat.tv itself was built on top of this API. Earlier today, Dan Blake told us that TinyChat will not charge developers for bandwidth. Stickam currently charges $0.45 per gigabyte for its streamAPI white label service.

Overall, this is a nice upgrade to the regular TinyChat experience. The old TinyChat, where users don't need to sign up will continue to operate. The big development is the API, however, and we are looking forward to seeing what developers will do with it.

Due to an unfortunate technical glitch, users ended up hearing the audio from the film's trailer over the interview audio. Overall, the audio was a mess, and UStream/MySpaceID integration for commenting was a popup-ridden, timeout-plagued, fail-inducing nightmare. Nevertheless, as a first-time integration of real-time, interactive video on one of the world's largest social networks, we suppose results could have been worse.

Neither the "studio" nor the audio, which was fraught with ear-torturing static, were what one would expect at any other kind of press junket. And the MySpaceID integration, which would allow users to comment on the video chat, was far from perfect. Every text comment required a two-click confirmation, but there didn't seem to be any options to have that content duplicated on a user's profile as a status update or bulletin, which might have helped with attracting more users to the chat. Moreover, a few comments we tried to send timed out or simply didn't post.

MySpace is painfully late to the game in integrating technologies such as Twitter, UStream, and other services that could grant the aging behemoth a second wind in terms of reclaiming former users, especially in the U.S.

In general, the ability to conduct real-time, live video interviews might be a great promotional vehicle for entertainment properties, but this effort seemed far too half-hearted to be a successful implementation of the available technology. MySpace, UStream, and the properties they choose to have participate in these kinds of promotions will have to do a much better job of ensuring a glitch-free experience for a larger group of users if these partnerships are to have any meaning in the company's future.

2. 12cast: After much anticipation, 12seconds.tv released their video application for the iPhone 3GS. The app allows users to create a short 12 second video clip and from here they can share the video's short URL with their friends through Twitter.

3. Twitvid and Posterous: Both Twitvid and Posterous allow users to create videos on their mobile phones and email them to be uploaded to the site. With Twitvid, friends receive a DM message with a link to the newest video. ReadWriteWeb recently covered Twitvid in a round up of Twitter video apps. Meanwhile, with Posterous, your files are instantly converted and embedded as a flash player on your site.

4.Livecast Bambuser and Flixwagon: Livecast, Bambuser and Flixwagon are all similar services that allow users to stream videos live to their channels, blogs and Facebook accounts. Depending on your community preference you can upload vlogs, short films and vignettes.

5. Qik: Qik allows users to stream live videos to their channels, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and Justin.tv accounts. One nice feature of the Qik video for Android is that users can trim their clips via their phones before uploading them. ReadWriteWeb named Qik one of the top 100 products of 2008.

6.Kyte: While it doesn't support live streaming, Kyte's iPhone 3GS app allows users to record video and upload it to their channels in an extremely easy manner. The service also offers branded mobile sites for big name celebrities.

We know we're only skimming the surface. If your favorite app isn't listed above, let us know about it in the comments.

The NASA Endeavour was set to launch to the International Space Station today at 7:13PM EDT from Cape Canaveral, Florida after a 24 hour lightning-induced delay. The mission was delayed several times and while Commander Mark Polansky's Twitter account and NASA's official account announced that the launch was likely to happen, online viewers watched via NASA TV as the mission was scrubbed with only minutes to spare. The launch has been rescheduled for 6:51PM EDT tomorrow.

The live broadcast as well as additional resources are available on NASA's Multimedia Page. Below are some additional space-related resources you might want to check out before tomorrow's scheduled launch:

NASA Collaborate:Those interested in joining NASA's online groups can connect via Facebook, Ustream, YouTube, Twitter and MySpace. Rather than waiting for press releases, fans can get their updates straight from astronauts, scientists and NASA executives.

Google Sky and Hubble's KML plug-in files: Google Sky allows users to view high resolution images of the night-sky. Hubble image plug-ins make for an extremely crisp intergalactic travel experience. You can search for planets, galaxies, nebulae and stars and zoom into them with great precision.

NASA Satellite Tracking & Heavens Above NASA Satellite Tracking offers users a number of options to track more than 2,500 satellites, the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. Meanwhile, Heavens Above offers satellite predictions, sky charts and info on a number of comets.

Among some of Watershed's most interesting features are its granular security settings (down to limiting access to certain IP addresses), detailed analytics, and real-time chat and polls.

Competition

Other white-label video streaming services like Level 3 (pdf) or Move Networks offer similar solutions, though they generally only target larger enterprises and media companies. While Watershed's pricing model seems reasonable, the price itself feels rather high, though Ustream's CEO argues that it is comparable to services from other live streaming providers.

Other streaming services like Mogulus Pro tend to charge a monthly fee for their 'pro' services. Mogulus, however, also charges for bandwidth and Ustream argues that its pay-as-you-go service provides more flexibility.

It's those damn puppies.

Reports were flooding in this week over Twitter, about workplace after workplace where people couldn't get a thing done because they were entranced by the antics of those little furballs. Productivity must have gone through the floor since that Ustream channel went live.

Oh, look – they're sleeping! It's so cute!

More Noise to Signal

When YouTube Live launches later this year, this medium is only going to get bigger.

The company says that these 10 million uniques come from the whole UStream network, which presumably includes embedded players. Third party traffic analysts Quantcast says that UStream participates in its traffic monitoring program (using embed codes) and reports that the UStream global network gets just under 8 million uniques as far as it's concerned. UStream says Quantcast is new to them and will take some time to catch up in its reporting. That may be a viable explanation, but the numbers are close enough. UStream also reports that their number equals 10 million people actually playing a live video stream - not people who have loaded pages that happen to have an unplayed UStream player embedded in them. It also doesn't include views of recorded videos. That's impressive.

Competitor Mogulus also uses Quantcast, and Quantcast says they have a global network that sees 4.5 million uniques.

Those are serious numbers. We've argued for some time that live video was going to be big, but the pace of growth is a little bit surprising. Note also that UStream was established just over a year ago, in March of 2007. When we reported this week that social news site Mixx hasn't been able to surpass 1 million unique visitors per month in their first year despite links from every story on CNN.com, USAToday, Weather.com and a list of other major media sites - we said there was an integration or audience targeting problem. UStream's 10 million and Mogulus's 4.5 million monthly uniques are what new media technologies look like when they really start to catch on.