The 2015 SXSW Interactive Innovation Awards will be presented tonight, and among the nominees for “Innovation in Connecting People” is Stre.am, and app that lets you livestream video and share it across social networks.
The platform was released at SXSW and has been in development for over a year. From the sound of it, its competitive set right off the bat includes Periscope and Meerkat, but one differentiator is that Stre.am allows you to broadcast across Facebook, text, and email. Another difference (compared to Meerkat) is that Stre.am users can choose who sees the stream and where it is shared, along with the ability to record and save 3-15-second video highlights called ‘Reels’ for 24 hours.
“When you look at the prevalence of real-time communication platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Vine–and how people use these tools share experiences, news, events as they happen–it’s clear the next phase in real-time communication is live broadcasting,” said Eric Bowman, CEO at Stre.am. “But it’s not easy. Our phone is the most personal thing we own. Our phones are our lives. You cannot game the intimacy and authenticity of real-time life. You just can’t. With Stre.am, we simply want to give people the means to enjoy a more rich, better connected future.”
Additional features include:
Real-Time Video+Chat: Stre.am’s user interface offers a slick messaging overlay so people can chat in real-time during live videos. Chat allows broadcasters and viewers to chat in real-time with a slick ‘hide’ feature to focus purely on the live video as desired.
Content Quality: Live video can be boring and the quantity of content can be lacking. Stre.am counterbalances this by displaying the most popular Reels of the day, ensuring quality content discovery and an overall richer user experience.
Video-Only Social Network: With Stre.am, you can follow other users, but not be bogged down with posts other than live videos streams. You can also ‘Like’ streams, without the archive.
Unique URL: All Stre.am users receive a unique video streaming URL to add to create their own social video home page.
