Broadcasting in one form or another has been around for a while. But with the roll out of Periscope and Meerkat in early 2015, broadcasting is gaining ground to be one of the biggest developments of the year. By the time you read this, there could be several other companies that jump on board. As of this writing, however, the following are the major players:
Ustream.com
Ustream.com has been around since 2007 which makes them an early adopter of the technology. They have pricing plans that are based on what they call viewer hours. Additional viewer hours will be charged for overages. The charges are also based on the amount of cloud storage is used to contain broadcasts. Other features have to do with where you can integrate with including social media and control of where you can embed the broadcast.

Livestream.com
Livestream.com is another paid platform, and has features similar to Ustream.com. They offer a basic package the is less than half the price of Ustream. The higher cost packages are lower than Ustream as well. However, the prices that they publish do not give much in the way of what is included. In order to get the cheaper prices, you will need to pay yearly. Otherwise, the month-to-month fees are closer to that of Ustream.

Periscope
One of the main reasons that live stream broadcasting has taken off recently could very well be that Periscope (periscope.tv) is offered as a free app for smart devices. It’s also easy to use. Periscope was bought out by Twitter even before it launched. Twitter saw the value of this type of technology and jumped on board. They have never looked back and have been seeing incredible growth in the platform. As Twitter is a social media giant, its online clout is sure to keep this engine running for quite some time.

There are several other players in the live stream space, with more likely to jump on board as the space grows. It’s hard to know who will gain and keep the highest market share. The key for the players is going to be attracting new viewers and offering the best live stream technology.