Allen Weiner

Faster than you can say, I am part of the Mapple Universe (thanks Lisa Simpson), a number of video services including Joost, mDialog and YouTube have brought rich on-demand versions of their web offers to the iPhone. Powered by innovative transcoder Ripcode, who has cracked the code in transcoding while a download is in progress, MySpace soon will find a spot on Apple’s iconic handset. But, as they say on the evening news, the big story is Livestation’s plans to bring its live streaming service to the iPhone in 2009. When exactly depends on ironing out some issues related to scale as well as Apple’s review of the application.

Livestation CEO Matteo Berlucchi (demonstrating the application in the below video) says key to being able to get his live service to run on the iPhone was to figure out a way to get past the issue that the version of Quicktime on the phone does not support live streaming. What Livestation does is convert the live streams to .mp4 files which Quicktime recognizes as very long files. One has to wonder aloud whether Apple will figure out a way to nuke this process as it reportedly did with Boxee when Boxee first hacked its way onto the Apple TV.

Berlucchi says his engineers need to test scalability before his company submits the application to Apple for QA review. He feels it will pass muster technologically, but is interested to see Apple’s reaction to a service that takes the video market to a new direction. To date, video providers offer their applications for free to consumers but as an increasing number of ad-supported video (live or on demand) make their way onto the iPhone, Apple will no doubt be forced to examine its model as it receives no downstream revenue from any ad-supported application.

if Livestation’s iPhone application works as promised (and as demonstrated in a live briefing it aired on its current desktop service) a few business models come to mind, most notably signing up cable news and sports networks receiving ad avails in exchange for carriage. Belucchi says that Livestation can target ads by IP address and provide detailed analytics on ads that run on its service.

Beluchhi makes an interesting gamble by going public and demonstrating Livestation for the iPhone. He does run the risk of a well-moneyed competitor (Google/YouTube, already in bed with Apple on the phone and Apple TV) beating the UK upstart to the market. In the other hand, by “planting his flag,” Berluchhi not only can field interested partners but perhaps backs Apple into a corner by creating enough consumer demand that Apple is forced to make the application available to customers.