Livestation Targets TV News Addicts via Smartphones

If RSS lets you bundle up a personalised fix of your favourite newspaper columnists and bloggers, Livestation’s live news streaming service is an RSS feed for square-eyed news junkies.

Livestation is a downloadable application that tidily bundles global television news channels, and is one of a number startup services offering live video streaming of news content. Others include Veetle, another website and application that was created by Stanford Uni graduates and facilitates high quality user-generated video feeds, and a wide range of illegal TV streaming services that are knocking around. Livestation’s primary content consists of excellent quality feeds from 23 partner news channels, who include Al Jazeera, BBC World News, and Bloomberg.

In exchange for streaming their news channel, each of Livestation’s partners receives a revenue share of their premium subscription revenues and website advertising profits; the streams aren’t edited, so ads on the channels are streamed to Livestation viewers too, and thus their reach will also increase.

While Livestation can either be accessed online or through the desktop application, the latter offers superior navigation: the experience is akin to iTunes, where you can scroll through channels as if they were album covers, tile as many video streams as you want (I stopped at 20), and skip between audio.

The desktop app also offers more than 4000 user-generated streams. These vastly outnumber the official partner channels, but Livestation CEO Matteo Berlucchi tells me they are “just to complement the desktop player”.

“We’ve built a video player that works on every platform,” he says on the phone, “so we let people use it to watch other streams. In a sense it’s like Del.icio.us for live streaming. We don’t look at it, it’s just there if people want to use it, as the crowdsourced element of Livestation.”

Berlucchi says that the agreements with partner channels will change if Livestation reaches “critical mass” and the number of users spirals upwards. At this point, stations will be charged to be included on the service.

The worry is that the majority of users will blinker their news intake though, and only follow sources that appeal to their political prejudices. Berlucchi however, doesn’t think this will happen:

“News-hungry people will, and already do, look for alternative news sources. Livestation can be used a source for more perspectives and views on news stories.” 

And herein lies the limiting factor. This is a service primarily for desktop news junkies. Where’s the wider appeal? Berlucchi think it lies in mobile and multi-platform services, and claims his company was the first to stream video live on via an iPhone app.

“Within three to five years mobile will overtake desktop,” he says. “There will be a big shift of all these services, so anything that is successful online will have to build a mobile presence on a scale never seen before, when previously, mobile before was an afterthought.

“Mobile is smaller and has different characteristics, there are similarities but also profound differences. If you’re trying to build an app for a smartphone and is meant to be consumed on the go, it will be very different to the desktop version.”

It seems that mobile is where the mass appeal of Livestation lies – junkies and industry bods can consume at their desks, but the mass consumption of news will be on the go.

Posted by Jennifer Allan in Creative Economy | December 10, 2009 11:50AM |