Let’s say you’re an accountant and you’re putting on a live seminar about new tax laws for a national association. Not everyone in the association can attend your seminar in person, so you’d like to have some type of live web video broadcast of it too.
You could just broadcast it using Ustream, but the problem is the information you’ll be sharing is only for the “eyes and ears” of the association…and you can’t (or don’t want to) make this information viewable to the public.
So what do you do? Well, enter Ustream Watershed.
Watershed is a new service offered by Ustream that allows you to “privatize” live, streaming video. Instead of everyone in the world being able to watch your live streaming videos, you can for example, only have people in your company or in your private membership club see the videos. It’s kind of like owning your own Ustream service.
With Watershed, you can also customize the viewer experience…add your own logos…and make it appear as if you spent thousands developing your own custom, live streaming software.
But there is a catch. You see unlike “regular” Ustream, Watershed is not free. You have to pay to play.
And it may or may not be cheap depending upon how large your audience is. Watershed uses pay-as-you-go pricing (you pay for only the bandwidth you use) and they break it down per viewer, per hour.
The cost is currently $1 USD, per viewer, per hour. That means if you broadast one-hour of live video, and one person watches that video for the entire hour, your cost is $1. And if you have 500 people watching your two-hour live broadcast all the way through, the cost is $1,000.
Watershed does not include a way for you to charge people to see your live video broadcasts, however, you can put your live video stream behind a protected web site. That means, for example, you could charge people upfront $49 to watch your live video broadcast (scheduled for a certain day and time).
You collect everyone’s money, tell them the day and time your broadcast will occur and provide them with a username and password. When your broadcast goes live, only the people who have paid (and are logged into your protected web site) will be able to see your broadcast.
Watershed is an interesting development…one that could potentially shift the landscape of expensive, in-person seminars. I’m sure they’ll be some glitches along the way, but it just may turn out to be a fantastic way to reach a global audience of thousands…rather than a local audience of a few hundred…all cramped inside a hotel conference room.
To learn more about Ustream Watershed, just click here.
As far as I know, you can assign a password to your Ustream live show, so only people who knows the password to that show will be able to view it. How would paying for this service benefit me?
Useful but they need to address the costs for larger viewer numbers… their costs should reduce.
On an associated note, I’m looking for a ready-made or technically trivial solution that will allow me to publish a video behind password protection, and notify me immediately by email when anyone logs on (and/ or clicks the video to stream it). Any suggestions?
@ Brian – There are no commercial solutions that I know of…you’ll have to hire a freelance programmer to create it.