Streaming Video Fail
So, as a lot of you know, my wife is having a baby soon. By soon, I mean she's full term, so literally any day now.
Now, I consider myself a fairly modern, tech-savvy kind of guy. I've got a Twitter account and a Facebook account. I listen to tech podcasts. Heck, I've even got a blog (though admittedly I don't post very often).
So, given that a lot of our close family (by which I mean siblings) are not going to be local for the birth (by which I mean they're living on other continents), I thought I'd set up some sort of video streaming service that close family could subscribe to as a way to be with us virtually for the birth (by which I mean the first moments after the birth). I'd heard on my aforementioned podcasts about several of these life-streaming sorts of services, most of which apparently now work on the iPhone over 3G, which would be the device I'd be using.
So I started by looking into the few I'd already heard of: Qik and Ustream. Then I did some Googling and came up with this excellent article comparing several services. But alas, after days of experimentation, I can't seem to find a single service that meets all my requirements.
My requirements are fairly simple, in my opinion:
- Be able to stream in real-time via my iPhone.
- Have this stream visible only to a few close family members via some authentication method (even if it's just a single password shared by everyone).
- Automatically archive the video for later viewing.
- Have the archived video similarly restricted to viewing by a limited few.
Other features, like being able to do live text chat with the audience, and being able to Tweet or send a Facebook post when we go "live", were nice-to-have options, but not crucial to my selection.
Let's start with the first 2 I tried:
Qik
Qik, confusingly, has 2 iPhone apps, which both appear on the phone with the title "Qik" (fortunately, they have different icons). Only one of them supports streaming, as it turns out, which is what I thought the whole point of Qik was.
At first, this seemed a pretty good candidate. I can specify that a video I stream is "private", both when I record and after the fact. And the privacy settings are inherited by the archived version (which is created automatically).
The only problem is their definition of private. When it comes to live streams, "private" means "only I can view it" as opposed to "only a select few of my friends can view it." It says so even in their FAQ:
Can my private videos be watched live by people I choose to share with?
No.
So I can have the saved videos viewable by friends, but not the live ones. On to the next service....
Ustream
Ustream seems to have the opposite problem, though it took me a trip to their Live Help feature to find out for sure. Their settings are numerous and complex, which would normally be a good thing for a geek like me, but I just wanted one simple thing: to be able to set the default privacy for saved videos to "Viewable by Friends" only.
See, Ustream lets you password-protect a live stream (a "Show", in their parlance), which is actually pretty awesome: my family doesn't even have to create a Ustream account to view the video, they just need the password (although annoyingly they have to enter it twice in the process of viewing the live stream). And of course you can save the videos for later viewing. But these saved videos, despite the fact that they come from a password-protected show, are inexplicably viewable by everyone by default!
I could go back and hastily change the setting of the video right after I save it, but (a) I can't do this from the iPhone app (either of them: as with Qik, there are two apps, only one of which supports streaming; but at least they're called "Recorder" and "Broadcaster"), and (b) I frankly don't want video of our child's birth available to everyone for any amount of time, even if it's just for a few seconds.
So, where to next? I stopped by the aforementioned blog post and started going down the list.
Stickam
After seeing Stickam on the list, I remembered having heard of it somewhere before. According to the table, it supports private streaming, so I thought I'd try it out.
Sure enough, even their How To says that you can specify "Friends Only" on your live video "chats", as they call them. I looked at the settings on the iPhone app (only one app this time, with "Viewer" and "Broadcaster" buttons prominently displayed on the splash screen-a marked improvement over the 2-app fiasco of Qik and Ustream), and there's a neat little Privacy selector, with "Friends Only" as an option. Perfect!
But after testing some "Friends Only" video chats, I found that both the live streams and the recorded archives are viewable by everyone. What went wrong? A closer look at the settings screen of the iPhone app revealed that the Privacy setting is under "Chat Settings". Does that mean that it only applies to the text-chat part of the broadcast, not the actual video? I'm not sure, but it's clear that the privacy settings in the iPhone app don't work the way I expect them to.
Next!
Bambuser
Scanning down the descriptions of the other apps, there was only one other which works on a (non-jailbroken) iPhone and supports private streams: Bambuser. (Where do they come up with these names?)
This one I'd never heard of, and probably for good reason. Even when I was logged in as myself, I was never able to see the "live" broadcast. Then, when I stopped recording on the iPhone, I got an "Uploading" screen, with the message "120 of 89006 kB of unsent data". I let it sit for about a minute, and we've now uploaded a whopping 1380 of 89006 kB. Not very impressive, given that I'm on WiFi at home.
As to the privacy settings, once again creating a Private broadcast is possible, but "private" means viewable by me only, as with Qik.
Now What?
And now I'm fresh out of options. I'm hoping someone else reading this will have some suggestions. If not, I'll likely end up using Qik (it seemed the most stable of all the services I tried) and just give everyone my own login so they can view my "private" video live.