Occupy Live Streams

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Directory maintained at http://occupystreams.org/


Discussion

Jennifer Preston:

"“The point that everyone missed was that people are not watching live streaming the way they watch a four-minute video on YouTube,” said Mr. Haot, whose New York-based company now has about 120 employees around the world. “They are watching so that they can be there and connect with an event.”

A live chat window runs alongside the video player on both Livestream and Ustream, giving users an opportunity not only to watch events as they unfold but comment on them, too. Since the first Occupy protest in Lower Manhattan last September, people from all over the globe have jumped into the conversation.

As a result, traffic to the sites has soared, and so has the amount of time spent viewing videos. For example, viewing time in the United States on Livestream totaled 411 million minutes in October, up from 270 million minutes in July, according to Dan Piech, product manager for video and social media at comScore, the analytics measuring firm.

Ustream is now also used by big brands like MTV and CBS News, which turned to its Ustream channel last Thursday to stream live video about the Virginia Tech shooting from its local CBS television affiliate.

On Ustream, Mr. Hunstable said, there are now about 700 Occupy-related channels, with 70 percent of the live streaming content created on mobile phones and about 89 percent of it viewed on mobile phones. Traffic to the site has increased by 14 percent since the movement began producing content.

The number of Occupy channels on Livestream is now about 120. Among them is the Globalrevolution.tv channel. It operates out of a makeshift television studio in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn and is considered the main channel for the movement.

Vlad Teichberg, 39, a former derivatives trader on Wall Street, is among the volunteers who aggregates live streams from the movement’s activities around the world. He first started live streaming from the protests in Madrid last May and then began using the technology to stream live video from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan and from various other protest sites. “We will cover what the mainstream media will not cover and then propagate it using social media,” he said.

This week the channel delivered live coverage from several Occupy-related events around the country, including a march in Washington and a campaign to fight foreclosures in Los Angeles and New York. In Boston, Occupy organizers positioned 15 smartphones to help deliver live video from their tent city as a way for people to closely monitor the police who have been trying to move the protesters.

Both Livestream and Ustream officials say they simply operate platforms and are not supporting the movements. They have made some adjustments on their platforms and provided some extra resources to accommodate Occupy movement video.

Mr. Haot removed advertising from the Occupy channels after some brands complained that they did not want their ads appearing next to streaming video of protesters. Ustream lent more sophisticated video equipment to two citizen journalists, Tim Pool in New York and Spencer Mills in Oakland, Calif., after they consistently delivered high-quality streams. Neither of them is a trained journalist or highly skilled videographer, but they each managed to quickly build highly engaged audiences. Mr. Pool’s channel has had more than 874,000 views since September and has had as many as 28,000 live viewers at a time." (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/business/media/occupy-movement-shows-potential-of-live-online-video.html)


More Information

  1. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/inside-ows-media-hq/