The Foo Fighters, Pure Internet Rock and The Future of Music

The Foo Fighters know how to rock. They've toured live for the last 15 years reaching a fan base that stretches across the globe. But last Friday, October 30th at 7pm (PT), they opened up the virtual doors to their Studio 606 in Los Angeles to put on their first live concert produced exclusively for their fans online.

The free live show was powered by Livestream and aired on the band's Livestream and Facebook pages to promote the release of their much anticipated Greatest Hits album on November 3rd.

The performance featured Facebook/Twitter chat integrations so that fans could interact with the band and each other live during the performance. The Foo Fighters' Facebook page incorporated a similar live stream+chat module that's been used in a variety of events over the last year, including CNN's live stream of Barack Obama's inauguration.

According to Livestream Co-founder and CEO Max Haot:

"As the Foo Fighters were playing, they were keeping an eye on the stream of Facebook status updates coming in, sometimes responding to comments and taking song requests. This is first time ever that a live concert was produced just for their fans online – it was not just a broadcast of an existing concert/event. The concert attracted more than 150,000 viewers and trended on Twitter (#2, #1 was Halloween), was #1 on Digg and was featured on Facebook Celebs. The event generated a lot of buzz in the music and social media industry."

Watch live streaming video from foofighters at livestream.com

The integration of live video and interactive chat helps build value on many levels by enabling artists to connect with fans, extend their reach through existing social networks and boost their video marketing, merchandising and promotion efforts. The cost to produce a live event using an online video platform like Livestream is significantly less than traditional broadcast television. Advertising and sponsorship deals will also help generate revenue for artists and music industry along with interactive elements and click-to-buy opportunities. The appeal for bands is obvious as Jason Kincaid noted on Techcrunch:

"Live concert streams seem to be a growing trend for the web’s most popular content and social sites. Last week MySpace streamed their Secret Show Weezer concert in San Francisco. And earlier this week YouTube streamed a U2 concert from the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA. The event was a huge success, drawing a reported 10 million streams. YouTube also streamed San Francisco’s Outside Lands music festival in August. Hulu has also gotten in on the action, with a Dave Matthews Band stream May."

Liz Gaines at NewTeeVee thinks bands are not taking full advantage of real monetization opportunities through advertising sponsorship, and made this point:

"But I have to ask, where is the business model for these shows? The music industry, after all, is well known for its trouble grappling with the shift to digital. It wants to keep charging us for formats we don’t want to buy anymore. Here we are, introducing a whole new category of music product, and there’s been little more than a Google text ad monetizing any one of these examples. Granted, inserting ads into live recordings may be a little bit more complicated than for your standard web video, but when we’re talking 10 million views, it’s time to get a major sponsor, or at least link in real-time to where to buy an MP3 of the song that’s playing. Live concert audiences are an amazing monetization opportunity. Lots of people engaged for long periods of time simultaneously? You couldn’t ask for more."

For the Foo Fighters, this live interactive video event was performed exclusively for fans and was both a first and hopefully not the last, as the band plans to take a hiatus to pursue solo projects. Randi Zuckerberg, who is both the sister of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's Marketing Director had this to say:

"I'm cheesy, but this Foo Fighters live on Facebook concert honestly makes me feel like I'm watching the future of music."

The Foo Fighters are:

Dave Grohl, Taylor Hawkins, Nate Mendel and Chris Shiflett

Also, in two weeks Max Haot will be a featured panelist at the Online Video Platform Summit speaking on Building Value with Real Interactivity.

Update 11/3/09 via @newteevee:

Foo Fighters Draw 440,000 Live Streams to Web-Only Show

"The Foo Fighters’ live show on Friday night came with little fanfare outside of the band’s core fanbase, but it delivered 2 hours and 45 minutes of greatest hits to more than 150,000 viewers around the world. The video drew 440,000 total live streams, with a max of 20,000 at any one time... (more) "

Related:

• Livestream Blog » Blog Archive » Future of Music : Foo Fighters Exclusive Live Concert on Livestream, Facebook & IPhone – On Demand Video and Behind the scene video available
• Foo Fighters To Stream Concert Tomorrow Night On Facebook, Powered By Livestream
• Foo Fighters Latest to Stream Live Show, But Can You Show Us Some Freakin’ Ads Already?

Ustream.tv on Non-Jailbroken iPhone! Ustream Gears Up to Stream Obama Inauguration on Soon-to-be Released iPhone App

Ustream has been working on an iPhone application to enable viewing of live streaming content from Ustream.tv to the 3G iPhone. MobileCrunch posted a video and a photo of the app last month and now the application is almost ready for prime time. Ustream worked closely with President-elect Obama throughout his campaign, and yesterday John Ham, Ustream Founder announced that with the new app you will be able to watch the historic Inauguration LIVE on Ustream with chat.

As Michael Arrington of Techcrunch says, "The world is changing before our eyes" since this would be the the first live streaming application available in the iPhone App store if and when it's approved by Apple. He had an exclusive demonstration of the soon-to-be released application by Ustream's John Ham featured in the video below.

If you’d like to try out the application before it officially launches, Techcrunch has a handful of invitations to give away. Just follow the directions below.

Instructions for preview:

1) Plug the iPhone into your computer
2) Wait for the iPhone info to appear in iTunes
3) click on the words “Serial Number” to cause it to change to “Identifier”
4) double-click the identifier number (the long string of characters) and then press cmd-C (Mac) or ctrl-C (Windows) to copy it
5) email that identifier to iphone@ustream.tv so we can build a custom version for that phone using the iPhone SDK.

Chris Pirillo who also uses Ustream for his daily live streams recorded this demo. He says,"I’m relatively pissed that TechCrunch got an exclusive scoop (and yes, it was exclusive) on the upcoming Ustream application for the iPhone, all things considered. Still, I’m happy to say that pretty soon you’ll be able to watch me - and any other person who uses Ustream - on your iPhone or iPod Touch. The app is very much real. Why would you want to watch? Think about it this way: it’s much more interactive than traditional television."


Watch Me Live on Your iPhone
Description: http://live.pirillo.com/ - Now you can watch me, and other live video feeds, no matter where you go! So long as you have a connection to the Internet, you can pull up our feed and participate vicariously with the community.


While Joost has an iPhone app that lets you watch their library of 46,000 videos it is limited to wi-fi network access and Ustream's application let you watch live stream anywhere is also limited to wi-fi. (See updated post)

Arrington followed up with this additional post, Ustream May Be First To Broadcast Video From Unhacked iPhone, which featured another demonstration of different Ustream application that lets users record and produce live mobile broadcasts from an iPhone. This is the first live streaming application to run on a non-jailbroken iPhone and is pending approval by Apple. Ustream is anticipating it will be approved and available in the iPhone app store soon. Both Qik and Flixwagon already have iPhone live streaming applications for jailbroken iPhones.

Scoble Declares Kyte.tv the Winner in Live Mobile Video Broadcasting Space

Admitted tech geek and über blogger Robert Scoble wrote a guest post in TechCrunch yesterday titled, Why Kyte.tv will kill Qik and Flixwagon in cell phone video space. As an early adopter of live streaming from cell phones Scoble has tested each platform and has been a huge advocate of Qik on his blog and incorporated it into his Fast Company Live channel.

So why the sudden change?

In the post he lamented,

"This is a post I didn’t want to write. Why? For the last six months I’ve been using Qik’s live video service off of my cell phone. I’m the top user there, with most views, most videos, and all that.... At the same time a company in Israel, FlixWagon, has been competing with Qik. I liked FlixWagon too... Last year I was Kyte’s top user too. Why did I switch to Qik? Because I saw that cell phone video would let me extend my brand into places no other video network was letting me get to..." (more...)

Scoble explained that,

"Qik has done something remarkable: it put a TV studio in my pocket. I can get live video onto the Internet faster than I can make a phone call (Qik takes two clicks to start streaming, a phone call takes 12 clicks on my phone’s keypad). Even better, while doing a video you can watch live and you can send text chat messages to my phone while I am filming."

He pointed out that he's received a lot of support from Qik and that his use of their live mobile streaming technology has helped him gain a lot of attention and followers. So why is Scoble now embracing another platform like Kyte.tv?

As Scoble said he's also a top user at Kyte and that for months he's tried to convince Kyte’s CEO, Daniel Graf, to get live streaming into their product. That finally changed when Scoble used Kyte to broadcast live from the set of FastComany.tv. Now he says, he's taking a second look and has detailed a number of points on why he thinks Kyte will dominate over Qik and Flixwagon.

In his opinion, Kyte has a better distribution system (embedded player with customized branding), better chat room features, ability to mix a variety of video sources, Kyte works on the iPhone and can play your own and other videos on a Nokia, Kyte is partially funded by Nokia (which may give them an engineering advantage) and has mainstream recording artists like 50 Cent, David Banner, Against Me, Mudvayne and Wyclef Jean are Kyters "which means its growth is way stronger."

Scoble's controversial post generated a lot of comments and discussion on TechCrunch, Twitter and Friendfeed. Like the following on his Twitter page:

flixwagon @Scobleizer says we'll get our lunch eaten for us but we respectfully disagree. Stay tuned for cool new flixwagon features http://is.gd/xAt about 4 hours ago from web in reply to Scobleizer

Scobleizer @flixwagon disagrees they'll have their lunch eaten by Kyte. Funny, @michaelf disagrees with me too about Qik's prospects. Love competition! 29 minutes ago from web in reply to flixwagon

A sampling from his Friendfeed discussion:

• The first to NAIL the iPhone / YouTube experience will win, Robert. - l0ckergn0me

• Interesting...I just read you're article. From what I've reviewed basically, is that Kyte is more produced/interview content, where as Qik/FlixWagon are more random streams...I will say that Qik/Flixwagon have far better browsing options from the web. I don't want to page through 4 stream at at a time...I want to see a bunch of thumbnails and choose from that.... - clarke
• It's that sort of thing that will finally push one of these live video services into the mainstream. Someone is going to see a political event or catch a police officer being a jerk or see someone committing a big crime... and all of the media outlets are going to direct their huge streams of viewers to the sites. This technology has too much potential in that regard. - Andrew Burd
• Scoble says Kyte.tv will kill Qik and Flixwagon in cell phone video space. He's wrong. http://offonatangent.blogspot.... - Steve Garfield
  
• I think they offer two similar but different services, Qik seems better for live stuff and has more merit for news, magazine style use, it's better for companies or organizations than families and ordinary consumers, which is where Kyte seems more comfortable. Maybe Qik needs to start fighting on a different battlefield, Kyte seems better positioned to win the mass market...with their endorsements. http://technoboogie.squarespac... - Shawn Roos

On TechCrunch, his post generated 119 comments by Sunday evening with the majority of people saying that it's too early to call a winner and that Qik still has a chance. Others said that overall features, ease of use, integration, quality of service, video quality and customer care will help the best service prevail. There were also several interesting comments by Daniel Graf of Kyte, Ken @ Flixwagon, Bhaskar Roy of Qik and michael @ qik who simply said, "Stay tuned "

Oliver Thylmann wrote about this on his blog and agreed with Scoble that, Kyte.tv will rule them all and referred to Kyte "as a full channel management application."

As mentioned above, Steve Garfield countered both on TechCrunch and on his Off On a Tangent blog, Scoble says Kyte.tv will kill Qik and Flixwagon in cell phone video space. He's wrong, and offered his support of Qik by saying,

"Watching videos on a Nokia
As others have said in the comments, your bullet list has a few facts that need to be corrected including the fact that you can now watch Qik videos on your Nokia device. They have 3GP files.

A Broadcast Studio with Mogulus
When you combine Qik with Mogulus you get the "ability to mix videos from your webcam, live videos streaming from your web cam, recorded videos from camcorders, or from places like YouTube, along with both recorded and streamed videos from your cell phone.

Extensive Testing
I've also got Kyte, Flixwagon and Bambuser on my phone, but haven't "extensively tested" tested them as you have because Qik just works for me and the people are super.

Qik is People
It's a lot like the video hosting space. When I first started videoblogging I used a couple of services that had great features, then I moved to blip.tv, where in addition to having lots of features, they have a lot of great people providing support.

Kyte.tv will not kill Qik and Flixwagon in cell phone video space." - Steve Garfield / SteveGarfield.com

So there you have it. The lines are drawn and the race is on for the best of breed in the mobile video broadcasting market. Bambuser is another live mobile streaming service that is more popular in Europe and has not received the attention of it's competitors but that may change as the mobile video war is waged.

TechCrunch and VentureBeat: Qik Announces Support for Windows Microsoft Platform

Techcrunch is reporting that Qik, the popular live mobile streaming service, will announce support for Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform today which will open it up to other mobile devices within the coming months.

Qik has gained widespread acceptance as the defacto standard for streaming live video from your mobile through it's early adoption by video bloggers like Robert Scoble and Steve Garfield. It's competitors include Flixwagon and Kyte.

Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch says, "Up until now Qik has only been available on Nokia smartphones based on the S60 platform. Qik says that they plan to gradually introduce support for all Windows Mobile phones (presumably with a camera and high speed data plans), though they haven’t offered a timeline for this. The Windows Mobile platform represents an absolutely massive increase in the potential userbase for Qik - Microsoft expects to sell 20 million licenses in 2008 alone."

MobileCrunch also has a transcript of an interview that Greg Kumparak conducted with Bhaskar Roy, Co-Founder and VP Product Management of Qik, and Jackie Danicki, Director of Product Marketing here.

Roy said people are embracing Qik and using it for a variety of applications. He said, "We are actually seeing very good pickup overall, where people are using Qik to do a number of things from citizen journalism, to lifestyle applications, to healthcare, and just sharing things with friends and family. Live adds an element which recorded and edited video can not do, which is impromptu. Whatever I’m doing right now, people can see it, and people can appreciate that."

He added that Qik has some very unique interactive features highlighting that,"The best part is that when I’m streaming live I can actually interact with my audience. Whoever is watching that video can chat with me, and that chat shows up on my phone. It creates an engaged interaction with me and my viewers, something that you just can not get with an edited or an on-demand type of video… After you’re done, the stream is automatically archived, and you can download it, edit it, and repost it somewhere else. We’re not taking that capability away from users, but we’re providing the capability to stream it live. If you want to edit it, you’ll have the tools to do that as well."

Below is a Qik video Mike Arrington recorded of Bhaskar Roy discussing the service with the Qik software running on a Samsung BlackJack.



In a related story by VentureBeat, Qik comes to Windows Mobile. Not Qik enough for 3G iPhone, MG Siegler says the timing is poor for Qik and that "This announcement comes just days before Apple’s WWDC event where it is expected to unveil the 3G iPhone. This device will simply overshadow all other mobile announcements in the industry for quite some time. Another potential problem for Qik are the rumors of video streaming capabilities being a central part of this new iPhone. While it’s no sure bet, there have been signs that such functionality could be a key component of an iChat application Apple is working on for the device."

Siegler added that Qik has been non-committal to support the iPhone and,"With the 3G iPhone, it could be an issue of being ready to support it or being left in the dust. Especially with competitors like Flixwagon and Kyte out there. Flixwagon in particular may be poised to break out beyond the elite tech crowd that Qik is currently popular in."

Regardless of how things play out, Qik truly is a remarkable technology that's less than a year old and has the potential to explode with possibly millions of new users through it's partnership with Microsoft. Hopefully it will be able scale it's service to meet the demand and not fall into the same downtime issues that Twitter has experienced of late.

The Week in Review, March 3rd - March 7th

It was another busy week in the video and streaming media world and I thought I'd try a new approach to comment on the big events that caught my attention.

Monday, March 3rd

It started on with Oprah's big web cast. Oprah launched a new global web cast series and had record 500,000 simultaneous connections which proved to be too much for the system to handle. I didn't catch it live and only read about it, watched it on demand and talked with a friend who attempted to connect to the live event. He said the video froze, sputtered and quickly dropped and Oprah issued an apology email that followed the next day stating,"More than 500,000 of you simultaneously logged on to watch Oprah Winfrey and Eckhart Tolle live, resulting in 242 Gbps of information moving through the Internet. Unfortunately, some of you experienced delays in viewing the webcast. We are working to identify the specific causes for the problems experienced and will work diligently to rectify them. Harpo Productions, Inc., Move Networks and Limelight Networks recognize that interactive Internet broadcasting to a mass audience is still an emerging medium, and we're proud to have been pioneers in pushing the industry forward. We deeply regret that some of you were not able to participate in Monday night's live Web event and that others did not have an optimal viewing experience"

• Oprah Webcast Draws 500,000 Simultaneous Viewers from The Business Of Online Video by Dan Rayburn

• Oprah Web Show Crashes on Huge Audience – from NY Post
• Oprah Fiasco: Web Show Crashes on Huge Audience from VideoNuze(News)

Other news of the day:

• Scoble launches FastCompany.tv.from Scobelizer by Robert Scoble

Tuesday, March 4^th

• Nokia to support Microsoft's “Flash-killer” Silverlight by Josh Catone ReadWriteWeb
  
  
  
• Mobile Live Video Streaming: PocketCaster Enables All Mobile Phones And PDAs For Live Broadcasting from Robin Good Latest News
• Mobile Live Streaming Video: PocketCaster Is Here - the3dtechnologies.com
  

Wednesday, March 5^th

• Adobe's Flash Player Not Suited For IPhone, Apple CEO Says from CNN
• Jobs says Flash isn’t Good Enough for iPhone from Silicon Alley Insiderby Dan Frommer
• Steve Jobs pans Flash on the iPhone from AppleInsider

Thursday, March 6^th

• Apple announces big news for the iPhone: Microsoft Exchange support, an SDK, games, and a $100 million development fund fromVentureBeat by MG Siegler
• Ziff Davis Media Takes A Dip In The Dead pool – from TechCrunch by by Erick Schonfeld
  
  

Friday, March 7th

• Kyte Becomes A Mobile-to-Web Video Platform For Brands (Adds New Investors and Live Mobile Streaming) from TechCrunch





Related:

• Weekly Wrap up 3-7 March 2008 from Last 100
• Weekend Reader: Hulu, Stage6, WB from NewTeeVee by Liz Gannes

Yahoo Launches Live! A New Live Streaming Service... Well, Sort of

In the midst of an impending takeover by Microsoft, Yahoo launched a new "experimental" live streaming service, called Yahoo! Live, which has already seems to have reached capacity on its first outing.

Both ReadWriteweb and TechCrunch reviewed the new site describing its functionality and Michael Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteweb, who tried to cover the launch live wrote, "It looks pretty good though early tests are experiencing scaling issues already. Apparently, the company that gets more web traffic than anyone on earth is incapable so far of handling 400 people watching 30 live video streams. Actually, a flood of early adopters just came in via Twitter and the thing promptly broke - completely as far as I can tell. The service combines many of the best practices developed by early explorers of the medium, tiny startups that must be very worried tonight. Part BlogTV, part Mogulus and just plain better than UStream"



















On the Yahoo! Live blog, Michael Quoc, Director of Advanced Products, describes the service as, "a new experiment in live video from the Advanced Products team at Yahoo!. Y! Live was dreamed up as a way to make it possible for anyone to create their own live video experience. Broadcast the concert you’re at. Webcast your own live DJ set. Lifecast. Build your own live video speed dating application. We’ve created a website and an API that lets you do all these things and many more."

Quoc continued that, "Keep in mind that Y! Live is an experimental release.... Y! Live is a limited capacity release, so bear with us as and we may reach our limits in periods of high traffic. Our top priority now is to hear your feedback – send your comments to ylive@yahoogroups.com, and follow our twitter feed to hear about headline broadcasts and notable things happening live."

Regarding it's experimental state, Chad Dickerson, Sr. Director of Yahoo's Advanced Product Team, commented on TechCrunch that, "Needless to say, we’re aware of and not surprised by the stability issues (ironically, someone sent me a message via Twitter about the servers getting pounded and Twitter timed out just before it delivered the message! C’est la vie.) This is an experiment (see our post on Yahoo! Next for more about the product and API — http://next.yahoo.net/archives.....s-watching ).

As it joins the ranks of it's live streaming competitors (Stickam, Justin.tv, Ustream, Mogulus and Blogtv) it will be interesting to see how Y! Live evolves and becomes more stable over time. Given that you gotta wonder what Google may have up it's sleeve.

UPDATE:
Sorry Y! Live but here's another TechCrunch review on the the launch, Yahoo Live Fails to Scale

BlogTV Goes Mobile

TechCrunch reported today that the popular live streaming web site BlogTV has launched a new mobile site called m.blogtv.com. The video below, courtesy of Niro3007, demonstrates how it works.

In the TechCrunch post, Duncan Riley writes that, "The new mobile site... offers live streaming to most mobile phones without the need for a plugin (I’m presuming it’s flash based, because it doesn’t work on my iPhone.) BlogTV claims that their mobile streaming services is the first of its type available for mobile phones. The mobile version includes the host stream, cohost and chat feed, fully replicating the normal BlogTV experience."

UPDATE:
Several people have left comments with mixed results that it didn't work on their mobile phones (iPhone and Blackberry) but others said it was working fine (a simple SE k610i and a Samsung) and one comment from Yaov said, "From what i can see it’s 3gp video streamed via RTSP (real time streaming protocol)."

See the related Jan. 30th TechCrunch post: BlogTV Signs Strategic Deal with IQC

ADDITIONAL UPDATE:
See the BlogTV blog announcement for a list of supported mobile phones.

Livecastr Debuts at Davos

A new live streaming mobile phone service was unveiled yesterday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

In this TechCrunch post Michael Arrington reported that, "Amsterdam based LiveCastr, a service that lets users live stream video from their mobile phone... joins a parade of competitors that have launched over the last couple of years, including Mogulus (not mobile), Qik, and Flixwagon among others."

Qik has gained a fair amount of attention lately through Robert Scoble's jubilant endorsement. He's also in Davos and you can see his Davos video clips on his Qik page,

Arrington pointed out that, "The main difference between LiveCastr and Qik is that Qik requires a software download to the phone - meaning that only a handful of handsets can currently be used with the service... but it (Lifecastr) works with virtually all European 3G mobile phones and many U.S. ones as well, without the need to install any additional software."

I watched some of the videos on the LiveCastr web site and although the quality is very low resolution, much like its competitors, it is new technology that will improve over time. Live video streaming from your mobile phone is just one area where mobile is heating up.

Clearly, this is the year that mobile really starts taking off.

Apple unveils Macbook Air... and More!

I was stuck in traffic on my way to work this morning when Steve Jobs started his keynote at the Macworld Expo. I quickly logged onto MacRumorsLive.com and Techcrunch at 9:15 AM Pacific Time right before his announcement on the Airport Extreme wireless base station called Time Capsule.

MacRumorsLive had a great live update and Techcrunch had great live pictures so I toggled between the two (since Twitter and Crunchgear were down) and watched as Steve Jobs put all the rumors to rest one by one, such as a iPhone SDK, iPhone Software Update, iTunes 7.6 Movie Rentals, Apple TV Take 2, and last but not least, the Macbook Air.

You can read all about it and watch the full keynote on the Apple web site or view the short video below courtesy of Wired.com and also check out ZDNet and Engadget's coverage. 

Although their stock dipped during the keynote and Devin Coldewey thinks the Macbook Air is basically useless calling it "a sexy lemon" it certainly was a big day for Apple. 

Related:

• Steve pitches the MacBook Air at CNBC
  
• MacBook Air: Not the thinnest notebook ever
  
• Why Steve Jobs has pulled one over on the entire movie rental industry
  
• Macworld: The Stevenote By the Numbers