May 2014 - Streaming Video Blog

#POWEROFONELUNCH

Written by Anthony Romero in Streaming on 30 May 2014

Today’s guest blog comes from our friends at GLIDE — Thanks Dori! Dori Caminong is GLIDE’s Communications, Philanthropy and Social Innovation Manager. You can find her on Twitter: @doricaminong

GLIDE’s 15th Annual eBay Charity Auction for Power Lunch with Warren Buffett, Runs June 1 – 6

Each year legendary investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett hosts just one charity power lunch to help support GLIDE’s programs. For the past 15 years, Mr. Buffett’s sustained commitment and the philanthropic spirit of the winning bidders, have helped raise nearly $16 million to support GLIDE’s unwavering mission to help San Francisco’s residents in need.

GLIDE invites everyone to join us + watch the final moments of the Countdown on Friday, June 6, 2016 at 6:40PM at http://www.ustream.tv/buffettauction

The bidding starts at $25,000 and all bidders must pre-qualify prior to placing their bids at ebay.com/glide. The winning bidder may invite seven friends to join Buffett for lunch at Smith & Wollensky, “the quintessential New York steakhouse.” Over the years, the winning bids have ranged from $25,000 to $3,456,789, with the funds going to support GLIDE’s programs, which help people overcome hunger, poverty, homelessness and debilitating health challenges.

Calling all sales buffs: We’ve got an opportunity for YOU

Written by Anthony Romero in Streaming on 28 May 2014

Were you among the millions of people that watched NASA’s Curiosity Rover land on Mars in August of 2012? Did you spend your Friday evening last August glued to the “crowdsourced CNN,” otherwise known as the police scanner that caught the play-by-play search for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev? Or more recently, did you catch any sessions from Cisco Live last week on Ustream?

Live video is making waves, and it’s an industry that will continue to grow, especially as more and more companies weave the technology into their marketing playbooks. Originally created to connect remote military servicemen to significant personal and cultural events, Ustream has evolved into a socially-fueled vehicle enabling anyone to reach global audiences and share experiences in real-time.

Our proprietary technology powers 2 million live video streams and reaches 77 million unique viewers each month. We see the greatest opportunity within the enterprise sector. Recent industry research estimates that 1 billion hours of live video was consumed for business communications in 2013, and this number is expected to triple by 2017. We’re building our business to scale to these needs, and we’re looking for several sales pros to join our team. Below are two roles we’re looking to fill on our Sales Team:

Account Executive

The Inside Sales Account Executive position is responsible for selling Ustream’s Pro Broadcasting solution into both a named account list and inbound leads. Candidate must have a proven track record of achieving or exceeding revenue goals and a strong background in customer relationships.

Sales Development Representative

The Sales Development position is the front line of the Ustream Sales Team, tasked with representing Ustream to effectively prospect, educate, qualify, develop target accounts and qualify inbound leads.

Interested? Check out our Careers Page and apply now!

Deathowl creation – Openduty

Written by Anthony Romero in Tips & Tutorials on 22 May 2014

Ustream as a company likes to challenge employees to think outside of the box and fuse in creativity. We believe that being surrounded by unique, innovative people helps develop new ideas.

In February, we hosted an internal Hackathon to give engineers the freedom to work on things they love and to hack solutions that could solve problems to find better ways of doing things at our company.
(To learn more, check out this previous blogpost)

We hoped that in a few months, one or two of the Hackathon projects would become a reality and make it into the product as a feature or a completely new application.

Some of our developers needed a tool to make their life easier. Instead of purchasing an already available product, they gathered together and developed their own tool, now called Openduty. (You can see the source on Github)

The OpenDuty project is an alarm aggregation and dispatching service built for system administrators and support teams on call duty. When an incident happens regarding our server or service, this tool provides a proper alerting system for quick notification. This development will automatically route actionable alerts when a problem occurs and determine whom to contact.

Till the end of the Hackathon contest an internal SMS gateway, a Pagerduty compatible REST API, and a basic admin dashboard was developed. The team succeeded to send automated SMS and phone call notifications for a given alert, escalate it according to a calendar, and see logs according to the failures in the system.

In 2 months they have build a Beta version and started implementing new bells and whistles.

Today, Openduty collects alerts from monitoring tools, provides an overall summary of the alerts and allows users to build notification rules. It provides also the freedom to set up multiple levels of coverage, so if the “primary” on-call person doesn’t respond to an alert in a timely fashion, it’s automatically escalates to a “secondary” person, and so on. The system integrates with GTalk, Push notification, Phone and Text Message (operates through Twilio).

The idea came from Bálint Csergő (Deathowl) who works as an Infrastructure engineer at Ustream Hungary. He and his team constantly work on new ideas to make Ustream’s service better.

We welcome any feedback or ideas regarding this project!

Don’t Miss a Beat and #ASKSHERRYLEE

Written by Anthony Romero in Streaming on 21 May 2014

Today’s post comes courtesy of our friends at Go Curvy. Matthew Barrett, Executive Producer of Go Curvy, is our guest blogger for the day.

The entire Go Curvy team is very excited about Thursday’s show. In addition to featuring barbecue recipes for the holiday weekend and a deeper look at the ingredients in popular cosmetic products, the episode will feature a live performance and interview with musician Scotty Grand.

Many people know Scotty from his appearance on the reality show Platinum Hit. On Go Curvy, he’s going to tell our host, Sherry Lee Meredith, about his musical journey from New Orleans to Boston to Los Angeles. Scotty is an emerging talent and we’re thrilled to offer him the platform to perform live for his fans and our viewers on Ustream.

Having a live music performance really allows us to take advantage of the power of Ustream.

Integrate Live Video Into Your Communication Strategy

Written by Anthony Romero in Video Trends & Studies on 20 May 2014

Seventy-two percent of executives prefer live video over on-demand video — But why? Let’s consider some of the appeal of live video vs. video-on-demand (VOD). Today’s socially-driven world craves instant gratification — and there’s nothing more instant than live. Live events bring together a community of engaged viewers that are all sharing the same experience, at the same time. There’s no delay, there’s no spoiler from social media, and you can be anywhere in the world. Don’t get me wrong — VOD is great and we cannot live without it — but there’s something special about experiencing events live. It’s something we all have experienced for decades on a consumer (and mostly physical) level, but technology has helped bridge that gap. Businesses have taken notice and are now adding live video into their marketing tool kits. Forward-thinking companies are harnessing the power of live video for a variety of uses, including:

TCP Engines brings Ustream increased video quality and reduced buffering

Written by Anthony Romero in Product Updates on 13 May 2014

Today we announced a partnership with TCP Engines, the leading supplier of TCP optimization solutions, as we are now taking advantage of the company’s TCP-MAX solution for streaming optimization. Our Ustream Cloud Platform is built on a proprietary technology stack: Ustream Content Delivery Network (UCDN), Ustream Media Server (UMS) and Ustream TCP Congestion Control Algorithm (UTCP). TCP Engines is at the core of the TCP Congestion Control Algorithm. TCP Engines congestion control solutions effectively unclog networks and find more bits to deliver to consumers, increasing the video quality and experience for consumers.

Arpad Kun, our director of network operations, provides his take:

The TCP Engines solutions help us further differentiate the Ustream platform. After benchmarking against all known TCP solutions in the market, we found the TCP Engines solution to deliver the greatest benefit for our platform, publishers and users. TCP Engines delivers over 50% increased throughput over Bic, and over 285% increased throughput than htcp. Further, by reducing buffers ratios to 1.6% and increasing video quality, we are able to offer a more compelling service.

Read the full release via PRNewswire: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/tcp-engines-brings-ustream-increased-video-quality-and-reduced-buffering-by-licensing-tcp-engines-tcp-max-solution-for-streaming-optimization-259032911.html

Visit TCP Engines: http://www.tcpengines.com/

#NoSlowLane

Written by Anthony Romero in Streaming on 9 May 2014

Seven years ago, my co-founders and I started Ustream with a mission to bring live video technology to anyone with an internet connection. Last year, our users crossed the 2 billion viewer-hour mark, and we’re incredibly proud of the open platform we’ve built. This activity can be largely attributed to net neutrality, which has been facing scrutiny from the FCC.

Alongside 100+ companies including Google, Netflix, and Facebook, and with the support of Engine Advocacy, we’ve sent this letter to the FCC, which is certainly creating well-deserved waves: http://engine.is/wp-content/uploads/Company-Sign-On-Letter.pdf

Help us preserve a free and open internet and please share this with your friends and colleagues. #NoSlowLane

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