Bambuser
» see bambuser.com as it lived, on the wayback machine
~ the goodbye ~
i missed bambuser. the consumer phone-stream window opened in 2007 and closed by 2014, my smartphone use through that period was for whatsapp and email, with the occasional google maps lookup. i was not the kind of user who pulled out a phone to broadcast live video.
the swedish team that founded bambuser in 2007 had built it as a community service. you opened the app on a symbian or early android phone. the app pushed your phone's video feed live to bambuser.com so anyone could watch from the web. it was free to use, the company tagged it as a tool for citizen journalism and live event coverage.
the platform got its global moment during the arab spring. egyptian protestors used bambuser to push live video out of tahrir square in early 2011, the egyptian government tried to block bambuser.com during the worst of the crackdown. bahrain and syria followed the same script in their own uprisings, syria cut bambuser access in february 2012.
~ the chronicle ~
| Born | 2007, in Stockholm |
|---|---|
| Peak | 2011, used heavily during the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Syria |
| Killed | mid 2014, the consumer live-streaming service shut down in the pivot to B2B |
| Lifespan | About 7 years as a consumer product |
| Made by | Bambuser AB, Stockholm |
| Killed by | twitch and the early periscope/meerkat wave eating the consumer mobile-stream space |
~ the AP deal ~
the associated press signed a content-partnership with bambuser in april 2012, ap reporters were given the bambuser app as part of their breaking-news kit. fourteen months later in june 2013 ap bought a minority stake in the company. for a brief period bambuser looked like the live-from-phone format that mainstream journalism would adopt as a standard, roughly.
it did not work out that way. the consumer live-stream window was about to be eaten by a different shape of product, the meerkat and periscope wave that landed in march 2015. by then bambuser had already left the consumer game.
~ the actual end ~
in mid 2014 bambuser shut down the public consumer service and pivoted the company to b2b. honestly, the new product was a video-streaming sdk licensed to brands and media operators. the company kept mobile live-streaming as a paid service for organizations rather than a free service for individuals, the consumer site became a static archive.
the company itself survived the pivot. bambuser ab listed on nasdaq first north stockholm in may 2017 and reshaped into a video-commerce saas vendor by the early 2020s, selling live-shopping software to retail brands. the consumer phone-stream era that the arab spring had run on, that part was done in 2014.
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