I just got wind via Mashable of a new live streaming service called Twitcam (formerly known as Mogulus). I had a bit of a play with it and found it exceptionally easy to use. Just login with your Twitter credentials, allow Twitcam to access your webcamera and start broadcasting. The service then pulls your data from Twitter to create a Twitcam profile – mine is here – including your followers and those you are following.
While broadcasting you’re automatically recorded for later playback. You can also quickly send a link through to Facebook as well as engage in text chat, which I believe sends the comments out as Tweets as well.
What I’m not sure about is what the embedded player displays. For example, with Ustream you can play back pre-recorded material as well as view live events. Ideally Twitcam will do the same, but I need to play around with this a bit more to be sure.
All in all its easy of use makes it a really nice offering. What remains to be seen is how light weight it is from a bandwidth perspective relative to other live streaming sites like UStream and Justin.TV. I’d like to experiment more with this sort of communication, however I’ve also found my home connection has trouble keeping up with things sometimes. I’m hoping Twitcam may be a solution to this, but that remains to be seen.
Update: I just conducted another test with the help of a few friends and discovered that the tiny URL for the live stream changes for each session. This is a distinct difference from Justin.TV and Ustream.TV, both of which have standing URLs for all streaming sessions. If you follow the presenter on Twitter this information is provided in every Tweet sent from Twitcam (by either presenter or participants in the text chat), for everyone else you need to be sent the unique URL in order to know where the live stream is taking place.
