--App Said to Have Been Developed in Less than a Week, Using Livestream's New API
Livestream, (formerly Mogulus), a New York-based company which offers a platform that enables amateurs and professionals to produce and distribute live TV on the Internet (note: the company, which offers "Free" and "Pro" versions of its platform, bills the platform as offering, among other things, the ability to mix multiple live cameras, imported video clips and overlay graphics, and as allowing producers to broadcast live from a mobile phone, use a customizable Flash player with integrated chat, and develop a branded channel page on its Web site that incorporates interactive chat--for an in-depth overview of Livestream and its platform, see the interview with its co-founder and CEO, Max Haot, that was published on itvt.com, May 21st), has launched a free service called Twitcam that integrates its live-streaming service with microblogging service, Twitter.
In a posting on Livestream's corporate blog, Sunday Night, CEO Haot explained how the service works: "Twitter users need only to log in to twitcam.com using an existing Twitter user name and password and press the 'go live' button," he wrote. "Twitcam automatically detects the camera, creates a page and live video player for the broadcast, and posts the link in the user's Twitter feed so followers can join in live. Twitter-centric services for sharing photos and videos have been exploding and are in high demand by twitter users. Twitcam fills the application void for those wanting to stream live and chat with their followers with a single click." Haot added that the new service "is also interactive, as it enables viewers to chat over Twitter while watching the live feed."
According to Haot, Twitcam "went from concept to launch in less than one week," and was developed using Livestream's yet-to-be-launched API, which is billed as handling live-streaming scalability, server-based recording and player development. According to the blog, TechCrunch, Haot decided to develop and launch Twitcam after seeing (via a live stream from Ustream) a demo of a similar app, called CamTweet and still in beta, from rival Justin.tv, that was demo'd at TechCrunch's recent Real Time Stream CrunchUp event.
