#stre.am

[royaldjurgarden]

Stream is the fastest, easiest way to watch and stream live video from your mobile device.

Royal Djurgården on Stre.am

[royaldjurgarden]

Stream is the fastest, easiest way to watch and stream live video from your mobile device.

[annamariasocial]

Let’s All Stream a Little Stream.

We have a few players in the live streaming game, but what game exactly are they playing?

“Holy crap, I'm making a sandwich! I better stream this out to as many people as possible that have nothing better to do than watch me slather mayonnaise all over this rye bread!”

This might not be the first option that passes through your mind when using a live streaming app, but believe me, it’s going through someone's. The recent surge in mobile streaming has seen these apps utilized during conferences, mellow walks through parks, dinner preparation, and most notably an overpriced hugging match. The one thing that all of this randomness has in common, is getting a brief glimpse of life and the world around us through someone elses eyes.

Lets take a look at what we're getting ourselves into.

Periscope

Available on iTunes

“Periscope lets you broadcast live video to the world. Going live will instantly notify your followers who can join, comment and send you hearts in real time. The more hearts you get, the higher they flutter on the screen.”

Periscope has an aesthetic and UI that creates an ease of use that's also not bad to stare at for awhile. Like what you see streaming? Just keep hitting the hearts and everyone will recognize just how elated you are watching some Dachshunds butt while their owner cruises around the streets of NYC looking for a Starbucks. HavingTwitter in its corner will certainly help in the long run budget wise, but they also appear to be a stealthy team of developers with no plans to open the API to a third party any time soon. It’s been “coming soon to Android” for the past two months but just recently offered an email form after streams to be notified of the release. I personally have very few issues while using periscope although many users have quite the contrary to say about their experience.

Stre.am

Available on iTunes and Google Play

“Life is, and should be, unscripted. Stre.am encourages users to share moments, and not memories. From street soccer in Madrid to local band practices, users from around the world share unique moments every day.”

For being the lesser known of these three, Stre.am quite possibly has the best understanding of what people want instead of telling them what they want. For starters it streams in landscape instead of the self inflicted concussion induced byvertical filmography. While watching streams, you also have the option to choose one or the other based on your comment reading preference. With Stre.am not having the massive user base of a hundred-thousand people trying to get stream famous, it has become more of a community of unlikely friends sharing their personal stories. You could literally take ten streamers and have a cast for Suicide Squad and it would be believable. Finally this is on both major OS and works close to flawless which seems an impossible task for the other two.

Meerkat

Available on iTunes and Google Play

“Meerkat allows you to live stream video from your phone to all of your Twitter followers at once. Press ‘Stream’, and instantly your live video stream shows up in your follower’s Twitter feeds.”

Meerkat was the first of this new batch of streaming apps I started using right after the massive hype of SXSW. It didn't matter if I was on my iPhone or iPad, it just worked seamlessly without all the bells and whistles expected from apps these days. Meerkat had this shiny new social platform on lockdown and they would surely come away on top, until the “Android Beta Debacle”. My daily driver is a LG G3 so I was more than happy to get in on this action. I'm not sure what happened, but it seemed as if they just pushed out a pre-alpha “I’m just going to boil this linguine for two minutes” version.

I couldn't get a stream to last more than four seconds through six versions. That really is the main concept behind the app right? Were they trying to beat Periscope just to say they stuck their flag on Android first? The latest update 1.0.2 has vastly improved on many issues but still leaves the concern of what was behind the team's choice of forcing out a clearly subpar shell of its iOS counterpart.

Social Media, Content, and Marketing Live Streams

At this point it’s anyones guess as to which direction this type of media will take us after throwing advertising, marketing, and promotions in the mix. People are streaming to not only let people live vicariously through them, but also share a bit of themselves with the world. Pubs have iPads set up on the bar as people watching from all over participate in a friendly trivia night just by commenting. The fashion industry is using it to give us a backstage pass to an event we could never imagine attending. Live streaming is hardly a new idea, but it’s quite possibly the next way we communicate and share experiences with each other in this FoMo generation we’re in.

[ladyclairhumphries]

Stre.am vs Periscope

So I wrote my first Tumblr about my two favorite streaming apps and I got some questions/feedback about what I meant when I described the two so I'll go in and give a little more detail.

Stre.am- On average there are a smaller number of people streaming. Most of the time you have 5-6 steams going, and the highest number of people I’ve seen streaming at one time is 12.

Periscope- It’s hard to know how many people are streaming because there are so many and every time you refresh there are new streams to choose from. I’d easily say there are 50+ people streaming at any given moment on Periscope. 

Stre.am- Since there are less people making a stream on average it’s easy to keep track of who’s streaming, how long they stream and how often they stream. There are some people that stream every day, multiple times a day. Then there are some people that you see every now and then.

Periscope- Due to the large numbers of people streaming at any given time, Periscope seems endless. Unless you follow someone, you will lose them. There is no easy way to track usage unless you follow them. Some of the people I follow stream at least once a day most don’t.

Stre.am- Most of the people who stream daily do it for over 30 minutes.

Periscope- Most people stream for under 10 minutes.

Stre.am- Since many people using the app tend to stream multiple times a day and for longer periods, their streams are centered around themselves. What they are doing, killing time, things going on in their life, etc

Periscope- Unless it’s a celebrity, most users are streaming about an activity. visiting someplace, going out to dinner, concerts, etc. 

Stre.am- Since the people streaming are talking about themselves and their lives, the chat tends to center around a sense of community. Insides jokes, how are the kids, how did your job interview go, etc.

Periscope- Since the people streaming are doing an activity, the chat tends to center around it. Where are you, what are you doing, etc.

Stre.am- Everyone is nice, but it’s a hard earned respect. New people’s streams tend to be ignored in favor of more established streamers. Chat stays friendly and mostly troll free since stre.amers patrol and report any activity an outsider does that isn’t condoned by the stre.am regulars. Stre.am regulars are able to troll at will.

Perscope- Most people are nice but you do have more trolls as there isn’t any active policing. 

This post focused more on content than the app itself since I think Stre.am is the better app functionality wise. 

As for me, after using both of them I’m gonna start using Periscope exclusively since I like seeing activities more and after a while the monotonous content on Stre.am bores me. I’m in no way disparaging the people on Stre.am, as there are some really interesting people.

In the end it all comes down to personal choice. Try them both out.

[ladyclairhumphries]

So I was talking about streaming apps the other day to a friend who didn’t know what they were so I wanted to go over the different ones that I’ve used and kinda compare them.

Meerkat:

Overall this was the one I liked the least. The user interface wasn’t intuitive and I just didn’t like it very much so I didn’t spend much time using it.

Stre.am:

This is the little app that could. The design of the app is A+. It’s easy to use and navigate. You can film in landscape, which is a much better experience. The developers are very hands on and interact with the people on the app. People tend to stream a lot and for longer periods of time. Their streams tend to be more about connecting with each other. While it’s an interesting use of streaming it comes across cliquesish. New people won’t really have the social interaction until the “regulars” get to know them. It’s a mix between the bar in Cheers and high school, where everyone knows your name but they don’t invite you to the cool kids table.

Periscope:

Probably the most known of the apps right now. They have a lot celebrity streamers. The app is easy to use and navigate (not as easy as Stre.am) offers a lot of functionality. Overall it’s a decent app. The way that it differs from Stre.am from a user perspective is that Periscope seems so large and there are a lot of people filming a lot of things all the time. While Stre.am seems more about building community Periscope is about showing the world whatever cool thing you maybe doing. The streams tend to be shorter and and there are no real “regulars.”

Periscope is for streaming your trip to the top of the Eiffel Tower, Stre.am is for spending the next two weeks talking to your internet friends about it.

[fabricmedia]

Stre.am CEO Eric Bowman sits down with the Daily Dot’s Tom Cheredar in Austin to discuss Stre.am and the live streaming video boom.

[fabricmedia]

An introduction to Stre.am from CEO Eric Bowman

What is Stre.am and why did you create it? Stre.am is a video platform for anyone with a phone to broadcast and share life’s experiences as they happen.

[streamwithadot]

Friend of the Stre.am Team, FashiongirlMelissa took this great stre.am from the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.