New Livestream now has Free Producer accounts

New Livestream now has Free Producer accounts.

Good News
No Ads apparently.

Bad News
Viewers must login to watch live streams in free accounts.
Event only archived for one month before being deleted.

Various
Still tied to their software/hardware (can't use Adobe FMLE for example).
Not only no embedding but I've heard no embedding will come for basic paid Producer accounts either. Apparently you'll need a Premium account for embedding.
As you know streams are Event based rather than 24/7 channel based

The fishy hook (to me) No Ads and Required Login seems like a vehicle to increase their registration which one might suspect has been low.

The business model they have confuses me. I have tried many times to use Livestream but it never worked right. It seems like its generally for paying customers. The free stuff is a gimmick to get you to check them out

At one point, pre "New" days, they told me they could discontinue their free service and it would have virtually no impact on them financially. The ad based free service did little more than break even. Their paid services made the money.

So it looks like they're dispensing with the ads entirely with their new service. Instead it seems they're using forced registration to boost their numbers as a pool of people to hook into their paid services. I suspect ads will be there at the discretion of producers to split monitization with them. Their focus is on paid services for sure though from basic paid producer accounts, new premium accounts (which will include embed), selling through their store and now their hardware and soon, software. They also sell production services.

What I like about "original" Livestream was the 24/7 channel based approach and a "studio" which allowed multiple cameras coming in from different locations (think ENG field reporters). I've had a relationship with them that resulted in my having a premium channel but those benefits are not being rolled over to new Livestream.

More details on their new business model.


Livestream Goes Completely Ad-Free, Even for its Free Service
http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articl...ice-85042.aspx