Livestream

» see livestream.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

There is a small category of companies that lose because their name becomes a word. Livestream is the cleanest example I can think of. In 2009 the founders paid roughly a hundred thousand dollars at auction for livestream.com, on the theory that owning the plain description of the thing you sell is worth that much. Fifteen years later the plain description was a verb that everybody used about every platform, most of them free, and the brand had become impossible to distinguish from the activity. You cannot advertise your way out of that.

It was founded in 2007 as Mogulus by Max Haot with three co-founders, and the first product was closer to a toy: a browser tool that let anyone assemble a channel out of live camera feeds and prerecorded clips, then broadcast the result free with advertising over the top. Ustream and Justin.tv both started in March of that same year, and all three spent the following decade discovering that the free consumer half of live video would go to companies with much larger balance sheets. Mogulus went upmarket instead, renamed itself in May 2009 and started selling to the people paying for the event rather than the people at it.

Which is why almost nobody has a memory of using it. I have certainly watched things that were running on Livestream, because between roughly 2011 and 2018 a conference stream or a company keynote embedded outside YouTube was very likely on either this or Ustream, and neither of them put its name anywhere you would look. The product was designed to be invisible: whatever branding existed belonged to the organization holding the event. That is a fine way to sell software and a terrible way to be remembered, and it is most of why this grave needed writing at all.

~ the dossier ~

~ what mogulus was ~

The original pitch was a television station in a browser tab. You could set up a schedule, drop in prerecorded video, cut to a live webcam when you wanted, and let it run around the clock, which in 2007 was an odd thing to be able to do at all without a building full of equipment. It got attention for the right reason, which was that the hard part of broadcasting had quietly stopped being hard.

The problem with a television station in a browser tab is that hardly anyone wants to run a television station. The people who did want something were running one event at a time and needed it to work perfectly for two hours, which is a completely different product with a completely different price. The rename was the moment the company admitted that, and it was correct: the pro business was still standing in 2017 when the consumer competitors it launched alongside were gone or absorbed.

~ the box in the truck ~

For a web company, Livestream sold a surprising amount of hardware. The Livestream Broadcaster was a small encoder that clipped to the base of a professional camera, took the video out and pushed it up over ethernet or a cellular modem, so an operator could walk into a venue with a camera and a bag rather than a rack. Later there was Mevo, a fixed camera that pretended to be several cameras by cropping into its own sensor while somebody tapped a phone screen.

Hardware is the clearest signal of who the customer was. Nobody buys an encoder to stream to their friends. You buy one because a client is paying you to make sure the mayor's speech does not drop out, and the reason you buy that particular one is that it comes with the platform the event page is already built on. That bundle is what Vimeo agreed to buy on 26 September 2017 and closed on 18 October, the largest acquisition it had made, with the Brooklyn company carrying something over ten million events a year at the time. It is also the hardest kind of business to keep alive once every camera and every phone has streaming built into it.

~ the deletion notice ~

The end came in a blog post dated 3 February 2025 which begins by telling you it is already over. As of today, it says, Livestream users can no longer broadcast live events. Everything after that is logistics. You have until June to log in and pull your videos down, or thirty days from the end of your contract to move them across to Vimeo instead, and after that the account and whatever is left in it are gone.

That is eighteen years of other people's conferences and school ceremonies given a four-month window, which is more notice than most platforms give and still not much for an archive nobody thinks of as an archive until the email arrives. livestream.com now redirects to a Vimeo marketing page about live streaming features. The word is back to being just a word.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »