There is a growing debate out there as to what you should use for your live streaming. There are plenty of services out there but the four main ones include Ustream, Stickam, Mogulus, or Justin.tv. All of theme have their advantages and their disadvantages. Some offer more features than others, and some offer a better user experience.

Lets start out with Ustream. Ustream is for more of a mature audience, and is directed towards the professional. Although it has recently came out with a new set of features on, it still has plenty of improvements that need to be implemented. The average number of shows that are usually broadcasting simultaneously on Ustream is between five hundred and Six hundred. This means there are plenty of different genres of video to be viewed. Back to the broadcasting…. Ustream also allows you to record clips with their ustream manager and upload them directly to Youtube. Although this provides extremely low quality, it will still provide a good enough upload to be viewed. They also give you your own live page where viewers can look at your profile, chat in a dedicated chatroom, and leave comments. Ustream gives you a great list of costimisable options including the color theme. Some new features that Ustream is planning to have is the ability to embed your chatroom within your live feed. They also are allowing you to embed Youtube videos over your live feed and also allow you to reshape the video within the feed. Other embeddable items include an RSS feed, text, pictures etc. All of which i presume will make the Ustream user interface better than it has ever been before.

Stickam on the other hand is almost the complete opposite. Stickam is directed towards an immature audience. Although they don’t allow users under fourteen they still can’t prevent the younger ones from entering. Features that Stickam provides include the ability to choose different types of video players. This is great because it allows you to fit in your player where ever you need it. Stickam also like Ustream provides your own chatroom. Now what makes Stickam unique is that it allows you to pull in other video feeds from Stickam users and have a two way conversation with them. This is very useful if you are interested in having guest speakers in your show. The studio features are definitely not as high quality as Ustream but do have potential. Stickam also gives you the option to upload media to your show. This is a great way to provide entertainment to your viewers when you are not behind the camera. Overall they provide mediocre options compared to Ustream. A short description of Stickam would describe it as being more of a social networking site than a professional video streaming site.

Mogolus is first off not the fastest site I’ve seen. The unique thing about Mogulus is that it allows you to mix webcam, graphics, and video clips all together to allow you to make one big production. One big feature of Mogulus is that they allow you to switch from different cameras on different computers. That means you can be signed in on 1 computer, and broadcast. Then you can switch to a different camera on a different computer on the other side of the world. Overall Mogolus still needs some improvements but i think in the near future it wll become a very popular live video stream service. Before i leave this subject i should also point out that it is very hard to find Mogolus if you miss-spell it in a hand full of search engines including Google. It would be nice if the got different variations of the name in different domains.

Overall, all of these different streaming services allow a great user experience. They are all unique in their own ways. In my opinion though Ustream would be the best as it’s very proffesional and they give you plenty of options when it comes to broadcasting. This in my opinion is very important. I wish you luck in finding the service for you.