viernes, 17 de agosto de 2012

New Ustream App Lets You Broadcast Directly to Facebook

A new app from UStream lets you broadcast live video directly from your iPhone to your Facebook feed. Called Broadcast for Friends — or BFF — the app can be used to share a live video to just your group of friends or publicly.

Ustream recently integrated its popular video service with Facebook's Open Graph, allowing Ustream users to post what they're watching on the site on Facebook for their friends to see. The popularity of the functionality made the Ustream want to take its mobile strategy to the next level, and allow customers to broadcast directly to the social network.

"We have our underlying technology, the platform of Ustream, and we built it in such a way that we can build really powerful products on top of it," with Ustream President and Founder (and now CEO) Brad Hunstable told Mashable during a product demo earlier this week.

Videos can be recorded using either the forward-facing or rear-facing camera on your phone, and there are a number of built-in filters — which can be changed while you film –- in order to give your video a distinctive look.

A free download, signing up for BFF simply requires you to authorize the app via Facebook, a natural move since your ultimate goal will of course to be to broadcast the video you record onto the social network.

"The one thing we're super sensitive about, and we know users will be super sensitive about is access privileges," David Thompson, the company's new SVP of Marketing said while demoing the app.

An Only Me, Friends, and Public option shows up before you start, letting you decide how your video is shared. Your selection only applies to the video as it's being broadcast live, so if you do a great broadcast for just your friends, you can decide to make the finished product public once you're done by changing the privacy settings on that clip on Facebook.

Once you select a privacy setting there's a 3-second countdown and then you're streaming live.

"One of the most interesting things about this is it's live," says Hunstable. "How many times have you recorded a video and then forgot to upload it to Facebook? We've eliminated the need to upload at all."

SEE ALSO: Mars Landing Broadcast on Ustream Outperforms cable TV, Company Says

Videos are only saved to your Facebook profile if you choose to save them once you're done filming. If you want to broadcast live but don't want to save your video styling for viewing later, choosing the Don't Save option will remove the post in its entirety from your Facebook wall –just like it never happened.

As you're shooting your video, likes and comments you receive on your Facebook post are displayed in real time on your phone. So if you're broadcasting your child's baseball game a friend can ask you to pan the camera over to his or her child for a moment, or if you're shooting your own stand-up comedy act friends can egg you on in the comments.

Broadcast for Friends is available now for the iPhone.

What do you think of the app? What sorts of live broadcasts can you see yourself doing with the app? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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