Ustream

» see ustream.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

ustream was the kind of thing americans used. i opened it twice. once for a nasa launch stream that was probably better watched on youtube anyway, once for some keynote i forget the name of. for me the live streaming era proper started later, around periscope in 2015. ustream was always background, a logo at the corner of some embedded video on engadget or techcrunch.

the company started in march 2007 in palo alto. ham and hunstable were west point classmates and us army veterans, fehér came in on the engineering side from hungary. the original use case was a way for ham's army friends still deployed in iraq to talk to their families back home. the product worked. the iraq use case scaled and the consumer side outgrew it.

the peak years were 2010 to 2013. ustream hosted obama press calls and the 2012 hugo awards ceremony, the one famously cut off mid-acceptance-speech by an automated copyright bot flagging the embedded clips of the shows being honored. kanye streamed album previews on it too. that hugo incident embarrassed everyone and fixed nothing.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

two of the three founders were us army officers and the launch year was 2007, the worst middle stretch of the iraq war. soldiers had bandwidth in some bases but no way to use it for video calls home, since the existing tools either required someone on the other end with the same software or just didnt work over military networks. ustream's one-to-many model meant a soldier could stream a baby's birthday party in reverse, with the family hosting and the soldier watching, or vice versa.

the consumer business arrived almost by accident. by 2008 musicians were using ustream to put out free live shows, and by 2009 cnn was embedding ustream players for breaking news. the iraq use case kept running in the background, while the public events drove the numbers.

~ the rise ~

the funding rounds were big for the time. softbank put in $75 million in 2010, with peak valuation somewhere over $300 million. competitors arrived fast. justin.tv split into twitch and livestream took the business-focused side. when meerkat and periscope showed up in 2015 they pulled consumer livestreaming attention to phone-native apps. ustream stayed on desktop and kept growing on the enterprise side. it quietly stopped being talked about in consumer tech blogs.

~ how it ended ~

ibm bought ustream in january 2016 for somewhere up to $150 million. the official line was that ustream would become ibm's cloud video unit, paired with the watson ai products that ibm was pushing. the real plan was to turn the streaming infrastructure into an enterprise webcast service for corporate town halls and training videos. that plan happened. on april 1 2018 the ustream brand was retired in favor of ibm cloud video, which then got rebadged ibm watson media within months.

nothing crashed, nothing announced. the consumer streams that had been on ustream just stopped getting refreshed. the engineering team mostly moved into ibm proper or left. you can still find dead embedded ustream players on old engadget posts from 2011, frozen at the play icon, the api endpoint long since rerouted to ibm's enterprise dashboard.

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