This week, live broadcasting website Mogulus made a calculated and dangerous change to its site. It changed its name to Livestream.

It’s a big move for a young site that has seen much more modest growth when compared to other live broadcast sites Justin.tv and Ustream.tv. However, it shows that Mogulus/Livestream is willing to make necessary changes to ensure long-term growth. I look at it as a positive move for a live broadcasting channel with a lot of potential.

Livestream in Adoption Phase of New Media Life Cycle

According to the Tippingpoint Labs New Media Life Cycle, Adoption is the second phase of a platform’s overall growth, characterized by an expansion in the ranks of its early adopters, and some great experimentation with content types, genres and events for frequently creating content at various levels of quality.

Livestream’s modest growth is being driven by a variety of high-quality, niche content. Some highlights include the World Economic Forum, the New Jersey GOP Governor’s Debate,  and the recent launch of Space Shuttle Endeavor for which Livestream partnered with Spaceflight Now.

The channel is even seeing adoption from major brand names. Web hosting solutions provider Network Solutions has just begun broadcasting its own channel of free business webinars.

Here’s a professional-looking, low-cost marketing tool served on your own site and within a channel delivering valuable traffic: early adopters and platform mavens.

Livestream’s most popular channels run the gamut, from a local Arizona network newscast to an Arabic movie channel. The content itself appeals to a very niche audience. Their broadcasts vary wildly, most notably in their international appeal and vast assortment of foreign language broadcasts. Producers around the world are experimenting with the new channel which is an excellent indicator of early growth and extremely important in drawing a quality, motivated audience hoping to view content they can’t get anywhere else.

Empowering the Producers

On first glance, there’s not much separating Livestream from other live broadcast channels in terms of execution and it would be easy to dismiss Livestream as noise in an already cluttered platform race. I’m thinking Ask.com compared to Google and Yahoo. However, there’s evidence that convinces us that Livestream is still a channel worth watching. They’ve focused on building and providing a top-of-the-line, highly intuitive and easy-to-use backend editing interface. There is a free version in which broadcasts include ads and only employs the standard 4:3 aspect ratio.

Already attempting to monetize, it appears that Livestream is encouraging their power producers to upgrade to Livestream procaster where you can broadcast in any aspect ratio, use HD resolution, get deeper analytics, have no ads (or your own ads) and have access to ad networks to monetize your own channel.

By giving their users procaster tools (even for free accounts), Livestream is enabling producers to easily create high-quality video content. The end result, of course, will be a channel full of professional-looking broadcast channels. And the paid Pro account monetization model has worked well for Flickr. I expect Livestream will thrive on the model as well. Local TV and radio stations are already broadcasting via procaster accounts. This is no doubt a result of the robust and intuitive production tools Livestream offers on its backend, as well as channel focus on quality content. It’s a virtual TV studio on you laptop… wherever you are.

The Takeaway

If you’re considering live broadcasting or other video content as part of your social media strategy, Livestream is worth checking out if you’re not familiar with (or don’t have the budget for) video production. As with other, similar platforms, Livestream allows cross-channel embedding, so your videos are easily embedded in another website or blog. The site’s being employed by minor and major media outlets, as well as a variety of dedicated producers from all over the world. If Livestream continues to build its already robust backend production and metrics interface, it will continue to be adopted by users dedicated to producing quality content.

My Question to You

Can you imagine creating a live, once-a-week broadcast show? Hubspot.tv does this every Friday – the content’s not great, but they garner an audience! What would you do with your own live show?

Quick Tour

A few days ago (before they changed their name), I created a quick channel surf of Mogulus. If you’d like to see the backend and hear my five quick reactions to Livestream’s platform… take a look. You can see more of my Channel Surfing episodes at TippingpointLabs.tv.
http://www.vimeo.com/4610308