Bambuser Launches Live-Streaming App Birdplane
Long before Periscope and Meerkat, companies like Bambuser (not to mention the long-forgotten Qik) brought live streaming to mobile phones. Now that almost everyone has a live streaming app on their device, Bambuser is betting they have room for one more, and so the company introduced Birdplane last week.
What sets Birdplane apart from other live streaming apps, according to a blog post, is that it's "a conversational app, rather than a broadcasting app." The app promises low-latency streaming, something Bambuser has always excelled at, and is designed more for "one-with-a-few" live video sharing than the "one-to-the-world" approach emphasized by competitors.
That doesn't mean you can't broadcast to viewers outside of Birdplane. Before you start streaming, you have the option to stream to Facebook and Twitter in addition to your followers on Birdplane, and when you're finished streaming, you have the option to save the video on your device. Followers on Facebook and Twitter receive a link to your live stream; in my limited testing I found less than one second latency between the video on my phone and the video in my social media feeds, though the stream did take a few seconds to begin running live in those feeds. The video quality was decent as I watched on a 27-inch iMac screen, and so it likely looks great on a phone or tablet.
When your stream is over, your social media followers can access the on-demand version of the stream. And you can click on the thumbnail of the video you just shot on your phone and get a URL to share if you want to share it again via email, text message, or online outside of the app or social media accounts. You can also delete your broadcasts from your Birdplane history, after which point viewers who go to that video's link get a screen saying "there is no such video."
"While currently spending a lot of our time building awesome mobile live video products for the b2b market, we were thrilled to see the renewed interest in the consumer space too," said Jonas Vig, founder of Bambuser, in a press release. "But there were some things that made us cry at night (such as dead links, better ways to chat and poor quality of local copies of the live streams), so we wanted to fix that and built Birdplane. We're obviously big believers in live video playing a significant role in the way we will share moments and communicate in the future and this is still really just the first innings."
Birdplane is available now for iOS, and the company says an Android version is coming soon.