VentureBeat

UStream.TV, a live video-streaming application, has raised $11.1 million in a first round of funding from venture capital firm DCM, as well as previous investors Labrador Ventures and The Band of Angels.

Since its launch in March of last year, the broadcasting platform says it has had more than 260,000 broadcasters, 2 million viewer hours per month, 2.2 million unique visitors per month, and 400-600 streams at any given moment. It claims to have grown 325 percent over the course of the last six months

Users with a web-cam and an internet connection can stream via browser to any user across the web, including an embeddable widget for personal blogs, websites, and social networking accounts. Ustream, like some of its competitors, lets users download files in a variety of video formats, like .FLV, .WMV, .MP4 and .MOV. This way, users can upload syndicate their videos on the many video-sharing sites out there. Check out the sample, above.

The Los-Altos, Cali.-based company has had a wide range of celebrities and politicians use its services from Senators Obama and McCain, to artists Chris Brown and The Plain White T’s, and counts Bebo, Veoh, Digg, Meebo, Sun, and the Republication National Convention as past and current partners.

The video-streaming market is heating up, as competitor Qik’s parent company Visivo Communications raised $3 million to expand the mobile streaming app, and Yahoo announced its own video-streaming service.

And with more than 14 competitors ranging from Justin.tv to Kyte and Mogulus to Flixwagon, it is far from clear which company will emerge as the dominant leader in video-streaming, but UStream.Tv now has a significant cash advantage over its rivals.

In early February, rumors swirled that UStream.Tv was facing acquisition talks with Microsoft, but were never confirmed or denied as the company chose to raise money instead.

Lifestreaming site UStream.TV is rumored to be in talks with Microsoft, for a purchase price of $50 million. However, the company’s chief executive, Chuck Wallace, tells us only that the company is open to offers, and is otherwise talking to VCs about raising a round of venture funding.

Like many competitors, UStream.TV lets you use a webcam and broadcast everything you do, in real-time, over the web (see sample, above), although its particular focus is broadcasting live events. Live video streaming is an increasingly crowded place with web competitors Justin.TV and Mogulus among many others, as well as mobile competitors Qik and FlixWagon (see our review of 14 companies here).

The rationale for the purchase, according to Valleywag, which published the rumor last night, is that Microsoft would want to use Ustream to demonstrate Silverlight, its web development framework that includes features for allowing live streaming video (more here).

UStream may run into the same problem other online video startups have: How to monetize all the eyeballs watching videos. So far, even video giant Google/YouTube hasn’t effectively figured that problem out, and UStream is no different — the company has small ad-based revenue streams, but Wallace says it has more revenue models in development.

Also, yesterday (with an interesting moniker in light of Microsoft’s attempted acquisition of Yahoo) Yahoo Live launched and failed to stay live last night, apparently due to bandwidth problems. There was an interesting post in Yahoo Live’s blog, which suggests that Yahoo Live has an API that will allow developers to use Yahoo Live to build, say, a live video speed dating application (the example they gave) a la WooMe — something I haven’t seen from the other Live TV competitors.

Although some see a potential Microsoft acquistion of UStream an odd play because of Yahoo Live’s release yesterday, Wallace thinks Yahoo is focused more on the social aspect, while UStream wants to build a large-scale platform to broadcast events with wide appeal to the masses, such as concerts or political discussions.

UStream.TV, is a Riverside, Calif. company with $2 million in funding from Western Technology Investors, Band of Angels, and other unnamed angels.

The site claims to be broadcasting 5,000 hours of video daily, with 300 broadcasts taking place at any given time. Ustream says 115,000 people have used the service, and that it has hosted entertainers including Plain White Ts, James Blunt, and Soulja Boy concerts as well as politicians, like Mitt Romney and GOP candidate Gov. Mike Huckabee. It also advertises itself as a way for soldiers serving oversees to connect with their families — the company’s founders are West Point graduates (U.S. Military Academy in West Point, NY), and served in the army a number of years. It lists General Wesley Clark on its advisory board.

Here’s the latest action:
1) Pay By Touch needs $150M to survive
2) Wave power comes to California
3) Contrary to rumors, Google Docs isn’t dead
4) … and neither is eBay
5) Ustream.tv raises funding, serves soldiers
6) MPAA wins case against TorrentSpy
7) Dan Hesse named Sprint CEO

Pay By Touch needs $150M, got any spare change? — Despite sucking in $300 million over the years and not yet coming up with a viable business, Pay By Touch’s chief financial officer told shareholders on a conference call that the company needs another $150 million to survive, according to Valleywag, which also first reported the company’s filing for bankruptcy earlier this week. Beset by inefficiency and executive-level scandal, the company already took in a $9 million emergency infusion, as reported three weeks ago.

Wave power drops anchor off California coast – A deal between Pacific Gas & Electric and Finavera Renewables, a publicly-traded Canadian company, will result in a new two-megawatt wave power installation off the Northern California coast. While Finavera plans to eventually install over 100MW of wave energy, the deal provides for PG&E to only begin buying the first 2MW by 2012. Dozens of other building applications have yet to even reach government approval, suggesting wave power will be one of the last clean technologies to reach wide-scale commercialization.

Study: Google doesn’t own entire Earth, yet — A study by research firm NPD Group suggested that a large majority of people have neither heard of nor used online office suites like Google Docs, causing some critics to begin writing obituaries: R.I.P.: The Web 2.0 Office Suite. It’s a bit premature to predict the death of an industry that was just born. As this lengthy New York Times article notes, the fight of Google (and others) against Microsoft is just beginning.

EBay isn’t dead yet, either — A trio of hit-pieces from the New York Times’ Saul Hansell suggest that because some sellers and some buyers hate eBay, the company is failing and should be bought by Amazon.com. We’re not the company’s biggest fans, but as this Mashable piece notes, listings and sales on eBay are pretty steady, and the company actually doesn’t seem to be in bad shape at all. And changes in the auction market haven’t escaped eBay’s attention. The Financial Times details some of eBay’s internal efforts to update its services.

Video streaming site Ustream.tv raises $2 million, connects with soldiers — Although the company faces competition from Kyte, Justin.tv, and others, it has done a great job of carving out a niche for itself. A number of presidential candidates have used it to hold live question-and-answer sessions with the public. The company is also advertising itself as a way for soldiers serving oversees to connect with their families — the company’s co-founders were cadets at West Point together, and served in the army for a number of years. The company has also convinced former four-star general and former presidential hopeful Wesley Clark to join its advisory board, and has previously gotten funding from Frank Caulfield, co-founder of Kleiner Perkins (more here). It says more than 115,000 people have joined Ustream since it launched in March, with around one million hours of spent on the site per month. The new funding comes from Western Technology Investors, Band of Angels, and unnamed angels.

Hollywood strikes a new blow against file sharing — A federal judge terminated a case between the Motion Picture Association of America and TorrentSpy, one of the most popular Bittorrent indexing services. The judge ruled that TorrentSpy intentionally destroyed evidence and obstructed discovery in the case. As a result, the only thing TorrentSpy can argue in court is how much in damages it must pay to the MPAA. Just the latest blow against file sharing. If enough fringe services are shut down or curbed, legitimate startups could pick up some of the business. More from CNET News.

Dan Hesse named Sprint/Nextel CEO — The replacement for ousted CEO Gary Forsee will be Dan Hesse, a former CEO at AT&T Wireless and Terabeam, a dotcom-era company that raised over $550 million before selling for a pittance. Hesse has strong ties in the Seattle entrepreneurial community, which could be good news for wireless startups in the area. Whether he’ll resurrect Forsee’s WiMax initiative remains to be seen.

Justin.tv, the non-stop TV show featuring an extremely popular webcam of a guy named Justin in San Francisco (see it in action below), is unveiling a network to allow other people to do the same thing.

The technology required to stream video of your life to large numbers of viewers, while you are constantly on the go, for example in a car, is not as easy as it looks, and Justin.tv has gotten a reputation of doing it well.

The show is trying to become a company (in Silicon Valley, you can’t stay small and frivolous without people wondering what is wrong with you), and so a network is one way to do this. It will offer people a vanity URL (http://justin.tv/name) and the staples featured on Justin’s page, such as a chat room, calendar, clip archives and so on. Techcrunch has the details here. These features are certainly nifty, when compared to most off-the-shelf video tools offered by YouTube and chat/networking sites. Yet another company, Ustream.tv, has recently popped up to do something similar.

Justin.tv got previous funding from YCombinator. It has benefited from hype and entered bubble territory more than most companies. The other problem with a network is that anyone shooting 24/7 cams of themselves are unlikely to want to fork over any ad revenue they earn to Justin.tv. Few people are likely to spark with viewers as well as Justin.

Even this evening, the future of Justin.tv was being debated at the site itself: