A New Era, A New President and Live Video on the iPhone
If you live, well, on earth I guess you are probably aware that January the 20th is inauguration day for Barack Obama. A new President who, if anything, is well aware of the power of social networking (or at least someone on his team is) and likes his Blackberry a lot. Barack’s use of Twitter and Facebook over the past year was impressive but as he takes his oath on Tuesday afternoon, the impressive use of technology won’t come from him nor his team but from the good people over at UStream.
UStream.tv is a site that allows you to broadcast live video on the Web for free. That’s impressive, but it’s been available for a while (competitors Qik and Stickam do similar). What’s cool though is that UStream has just launched today their first iPhone/iPod Touch app. This free application is a video viewer and streams the video over WiFi (only) and let’s you watch any video content on UStream on your iPhone. The app comes just in time since the site will have a number of live streams all day on Tuesday for Obama’s inauguration.
I know what you’re thinking. No, the app doesn’t allow you to record video. Unfortunately, Apple has not yet allowed anyone to record video with the iPhone. QIK, a similar service that allows anyone to broadcast from their phone (works great with an N95 for example) has the application ready and is awaiting Apple’s GO.
