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in the wake of lifecasting phenomenon Justin.tv launches uStream.tv, an amazingly simple, free broadcasting solution. think YouTube, only uStream is broadcasting live-footage. a flash widget is used to record audio & video from any webcam or firewire/USB camcorder. the stream can be watched either directly on uStream’s portal, or embedded into any other website (very much like an embedded YouTube-clip). furthermore, live-shows are recorded & archived for replay.

uStream virtually removes the barriere for live-casting audio- & video-content, a tedious task usually involving streaming-servers, encoding-formats and bandwidth-cost. not any more, it seems…

with their latest beta-release a week ago, on-demand video service Joost is starting to make sense (to me): more content (f.e. the well-produced Ministry of Sound Access All Areas), support for the mac’s remote control (yeah!) and upcoming community features (integrated chat, blogging of screenshots). however, on a large-screen TV, video-quality isn’t there yet (though better than YoutTube etc.).

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the SXSW podcast & videocast is among the hottest content you can put on your media-player at this time of the year! subscribe now, content will trickle in over time!

I got an invite to Hey!Watch’s private beta today, and after trying it out I agree that it’s a very useful tool for collecting online-video. after installing the firefox-extension (works with Flock as well) or the provided bookmarklet, it’s just a single click to bring online video to your mobile player. Hey!watch seems to work with most video-sharing sites, I successfully tested it with content from YouTube, Google Video and Metacafe. video-clips can be converted into mpeg4, mpeg2, flash, divx, mov and dvd, with optimized presets for various devices (iPod, PSP, Wii, PocketPC and many more). what’s really great about Hey!Watch: the application exposes an RSS-feed containing all encoded clips - subscribe to this feed in iTunes, and you’ll have all your video synched to your iPod video-player. currently in private beta , Hey!Watch is obviously processing requests for invitation pretty fast.

social-news site digg.com announced a major upgrade earlier today. besides some changes in user-interface and frontpage-composition, biggest news is the integration of online-video and podcasts in the top-level navigation. podcasts can be dugg either by series or episode, playback for both audio- & video works straight from inside digg. popular footage from social-video sites like YouTube or Metacafe pops up in a slick lightbox. unlike competitor Netscape (who’s been doing video since quite a time), digg is not hosting videos on its own servers, but is rather embedding the original material. while this might be an advantage over Netscape (after all users can stick to their favorite video-service and won’t have to upload their clips to yet another site), it seems awkward that users can’t submit videos themselves - currently digg seems to fetch only the most popular ones automatically. still, I think chances are good for digg to become the single point of entry for online-video… given the plethora of video-sites launched this year, a meta-aggregator is definitely needed.

StumbleUpon, a browser-plugin (firefox & IE) suggesting websites based on personal preferences and collaborative opinion, has added StumbleVideo today. the feature acts as a one-click remotecontrol, allowing to zap through the latest videos of YouTube, Google Video & Myspace - of course, again based on your interest.

if you’ve hooked up your PC/Mac to the TV and a wireless keyboard/IR-remote, you might try out these keyboard-shortcuts (could’nt find them documented anywhere, so I had to trial&error):

arrow-right ... next clip
arrow-up ... like it!
arrow-down ... don't like it
s ... share with friends
c ... channels
l ... other users who liked this clip

with Quick Capture, YouTube has been adding a very interesting feature to their service recently. Quick Capture allows users to record & upload videos straight from their website, without the need of using any additional editing-software. by capturing any connected (web-)cam through a flash-applet, this feature greatly reduces friction in contributing online-video. my guess is, that Quick Capture isn’t primarily aimed at original content creators (those will miss editing-features - which on the other hand could quite easily be integrated later, in a Jumpcut-kind of way), but at people wanting to create instant video-comments on existing clips. YouTube could further support that usage, f.e. by automatically cueing up all video-comments after the original video. however, Quick Capture will certainly accelerate the growth rate of YouTube’s video-stock. plus, it’s simply fun

The second feature introduced is currently only available in YouTube’s beta-sandbox, TestTube. Streams allows users to cluster related video-clips on a topic on a single page. other users can join any existing Stream, contribute their clips into the public cue and exchange chat-messages in realtime. as far as I understand, video isn’t played back synchronously among all participating users, which for me kills the most interesting aspect - watching & chatting about the exact same image-frames as my peers - of Streams. however, by implementing synchronous playback, I think Streams could really become a very hot trend in “social video consumption”…  (via TechCrunch’s Arrington, who wasn’t to fascinated by Streams either).

Life Goggles has published a comparison of eigth popular video-sharing sites, including YouTube, Google Video, metacafe, soapbox, Revver (as far as I know the only one sharing revenue with content-producers), Blip.tv and others (click for part one & two of the review, or jump to the sample-clips for comfortable vice-versa quality comparison). while all sites are quite easy to use, the resulting video quality varys significantly - Life Goggles found metacafe’s and Microsoft’s soapbox’ encoders working best, but see yourself.

seeking fresh content for your video-enabled iPod? look no further! iTube (Windows only) is a dead simple tool allowing to download any clip from YouTube straight to your player. just enter the URL of the chosen video, and iTube will download the movie, convert it to mp4 (or mpeg, for other players) and update your iTunes library. it won’t get any simpler. Mac-users may try out PodTube instead…

wow, this looks like some awesome patchwork of technology! News At Seven is a video news-show, 100% automatically generated from content-bits all over the net. claimed to work totally autonomous, the engine fetches news-stories from various blogs and websites, runs the text through speech-synthesis, mixes it with matching still-images and video-clips and add’s a Halflife-character as virtual news-presenter - voila, instant virtual news! from the creators:

In this, our first deployment of the system, the show produced is a three-minute daily news update, featuring national, international, and human-interest stories, with commentary from blogs on the national story. After the material has been assembled, the system is ready to present the news using preset scripts. The engine, and our extensions to it, allows us to present believable human-like newscasters as well as more imaginative scenes and sets that are only possible because the show is virtual. We also use techniques to make the generated vocal audio more interesting and believable.

though the quality of speech-synthesis could be better and some of the clips look out of place, this feels like an impressive glimpse of how news/TV could be produced in the not-too-distant future… (and it reminded me of the short news-casts featured in Starship Troopers ;)…)

(Screenshot courtesy of Boing Boing)