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We spent quite a while playing with live video broadcasting from mobile phones at Justin.tv. The fundamental problem is that your Facebook friends are very rarely sitting on their newfeed during the 2-3 minutes you happen to be broadcasting, so they miss your broadcast. We never fully solved this.

For example, after looking at the data from a few hundred thousand iPhone broadcasts, we noticed that over 90% of mobile phone broadcasts were viewed after the broadcast ended. Not quite the interactive experience we (or our users) hoped for. This is exactly why we built Socialcam.

Anyways, best of luck to the Color team. This is a difficult problem and I hope they manage to find an innovative way to solve it!




It works best for people with lots of followers- my (famous) friends do livestreams all the time ("watch me bake some cookies!") and have hundreds of people attend.

I see this as a transitional stepping stone towards a more videochat-enabled world. Color, or a similar app, adds video layer onto the tweet/FB status-style of broadcasting and sharing; it is the mass-social counterpart to what FaceTime is doing for phone calls.

Color:Facetime::Status update:Phonecall




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