Let’s say you’re an accountant and you’re putting on a live seminar about new tax laws for a national association.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
So what do you do?\u00a0 Well, enter Ustream Watershed<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Watershed<\/strong> is a new service offered by Ustream that allows you to “privatize” live, streaming video.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It’s kind of like owning your own Ustream service.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n But there is a catch.\u00a0 You see unlike “regular” Ustream, Watershed is not free.\u00a0 You have to pay to play.<\/p>\n And it may or may not be cheap depending upon how large your audience is.\u00a0 Watershed uses pay-as-you-go pricing (you pay for only the bandwidth you use) and they break it down per viewer, per hour.<\/p>\n The cost is currently $1 USD, per viewer, per hour.\u00a0 That means if you broadast one-hour of live video, and one person watches that video for the entire hour, your cost is $1.\u00a0 And if you have 500 people watching your two-hour live broadcast all the way through, the cost is $1,000.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 That means, for example, you could charge people upfront $49 to watch your live video broadcast (scheduled for a certain day and time).<\/p>\n You collect everyone’s money, tell them the day and time your broadcast will occur and provide them with a username and password.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Watershed is an interesting development…one that could potentially shift the landscape of expensive, in-person seminars.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n