Stream live video to the iPhone with Livestream’s Procaster
Livestream, a live video startup formerly known as Mogulus, just launched a service that will let you stream video to iPhone or iPod Touch users without having to build your own app.
The iPhone can be troublesome for playing video, seeing as it doesn’t yet work with Flash web sites. (Flash powers about 75 percent of web video.) Hence, publishers have to resort to building their own apps if they want to broadcast video live.
The Livestream Procaster gets around this by using new live streaming functionality built into the QuickTime player, so you don’t have to get iPhone App Store approval to launch your own live channel. Competitor Ustream has a special iPhone viewer app, but that means anyone who wants to view your stream on a mobile device has to have downloaded the app already.
If you want to use the Procaster, you download it here for free, connect a video camera, select ‘iPhone 3G Quality’ and then press ‘Go Live.’ A user can then watch it by going to iphone.livestream.com and picking the right channel. It works over a 3G or Wi-Fi connection.
New York-based Livestream was founded two years ago as Mogulus. It raised a reported $10 million from investors including Gannett Co. in July 2008, although exact terms were not disclosed. That came on top of $1.2 million in angel funding.
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About the Author, Kim-Mai Cutler
Kim-Mai was born and raised a stone's throw from Apple headquarters in Cupertino by a devout Hewlett-Packard family. After attending UC Berkeley, Kim-Mai worked for Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires in New York, Los Angeles, London and Buenos Aires. Follow her on Twitter at @kimmaicutler, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.