There are free services, such as uStream and Justin.tv, but the quality they offer can be erratic and, if you are using one of the free tiers of service, your content will have pre-roll and/or pop-up ads. This is annoying.

In a perfect world, we’d all have our own Flash media streaming setups we could push a button and start using. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the time to manage all that stuff.

Enter Amazon, naturally.

They’ve announced today a new service and framework to get up and running doing live Flash media streaming. They’ve combined several of their services, including DNS, servers on demand and their content delivery network to offer an interesting on-demand Flash streaming rig.

The actual setup looks like this, but don’t be scared by all the pieces.

With their CloudFormation service, much of the work of setup only needs to be done once. Instances can be created from that template as needed.

Let’s look at costs for this type of setup. According to Amazon, they say this about costs:

In addition to the $5.00 monthly subscription fee for Flash Media Server on Amazon EC2, you pay for only for the AWS resources you consume.

Let’s examine those costs for a moment. After the $5 monthly charge, you’ll pay $0.44 USD for a server in Virginia that can support 100 simultaneous connections. Prices go up from there. Streaming to 1,000 users would run you $1.30 USD per hour. Prices are higher in Asia and Japan.

The big unknown here is bandwidth usage. I’m having a hard time trying to estimate the amount of bandwidth needed for an event, such as graduation. 20GB? 50GB? 100GB? If you have a number you’ve seen in the past, let me know so I can correct the numbers.

Let’s use 100 as our basis here – that bandwidth would cost you $15.00 USD.

So let’s say you are streaming two hours of Commencement. That would be:

• Flash: $5
• 1000 streams at $1.30 per hour: $2.50
• 100GB of Bandwidth: $15.00

Under $25 for a platform you have full control over? That’s not too shabby.

Let’s compare that to some other services out there:

uStream offers ad-free streams, and you can get 100 hours for $99 per month. 4,000 ad-free hours per month will run you $500 a month. LiveStream.com offers 3,000 ad-free hours and HD quality for $350 per month.

Looks like an interesting offering from Amazon. As we start to plan our graduation streaming, it will definitely be in the mix. If you’d like to read a tutorial from Amazon on live Flash streaming, you can check it out here.

The challenge with setting up for Ustream is that it required a video camera, laptop and internet connection. I’ve been watching anxiously over the last year for a way to do it easily on a mobile device. I think that day has finally come – which is especially important to those of us who, thanks to lame contracts, haven’t been able to affordably upgrade to an iPhone 3GS.

You could stream on UStream for a few months now using a jailbroken iPhone, that is, an iPhone that’s used software to get into your phone to allow applications unapproved by Apple to run. I didn’t really want to do that, so I waited and waited.

Click for a full-size screenshot

Today, UStream launched its new app, Ustream Live Broadaster, which allows both iPhone 3G and 3GS devices to stream live video over wifi and 3G networks (sorry, Edge users.)

Once I saw the announcement go up, I installed the app and got streaming in just a few minutes.

First impressions: the app is really nice. It’s easy to use and the quality coming from my 3G phone is really nice. I walked around our offices (using wifi) and when holding the camera still, video and audio was crisp and clear.

There are optional settings to have UStream post a tweet on your behalf when you start a new live stream. That’s nice – there’s no sense in doing a live stream if no one is going to watch it.

During your stream, you can follow along with the chat stream, initiate polls and mute the audio if needed. At the end of your stream, you can save your stream to be kept at Ustream. I did one 20 minute stream and one 30 minute stream and no issues at all.

One interesting feature is that you can record videos in the app off-line and save them in Ustream, in both private and public modes. This could be a cool feature – I can imagine taking my iPhone out for a quick interview, recording it in offline mode, saving it to Ustream and have users view it when they want.

So far, I’m very impressed with this app. I think it’s something we’ll be using more and more of. Now, all we need are a few iPod touches with cameras and this could be a pretty decent streaming arsenal on campus.

Watershed is a white-label video solution that gives you access to all of uStream’s features and tools, but with your own branding, both in the video as well as the page around the video. Watershed says they can also stream 16×9 and HD content.

They cite education as a potential use, saying:

For colleges and universities the possible ways to use Watershed are nearly endless. Broadcast class lectures and campus speakers both internally and externally…Conduct a live interview with admissions office personnel as part of an open house…Connect with alumni worldwide via on-campus speakers and events…Deliver live broadcasts of athletic games and coaches’ media interactions.

For online education organizations, Watershed can be used to broadcast live lectures and have students ask questions in real-time. In addition, by using Watershed all of the live broadcasts can be recorded for future viewing as well. And don’t forget about Watershed for admissions open houses and alumni events.

For organizations focused on training and teaching, Watershed can be used to deliver seminars, demonstrations, and customer support in real-time. Audiences can ask questions via text and instructors can adjust their broadcast in response to audience feedback.

Pricing for the new product seems straightforward. For under 1,000 viewer hours a month, you pay $1 per hour. The price goes down the more hours you use. If you stream 1,500 hours a month at $0.75 USD per viewer hour, you would pay $1,125 that month. You get 500GB of storage included. You also get access to their API, which is interesting. I would this would be useful if you did in fact want to stream something like a lecture and wanted to make starting up the stream as easy as possible.

Streaming events at uStream is free, but if you really want to have a stronger say over the look and feel of the presentation, Watershed may be for you.

I’ve had good experiences with the uStream platform, as I’ve blogged about here.

In December, our SID came to me and said he was interested in streaming our games. It was a great idea though at first I worried about how to do it easily and most importantly, very cheaply, as our budget for this process was exactly zero.

There were three important pieces I needed to figure out before we could start streaming video. The first was the video itself, the second was the networking setup and the third was how to send the stream to the world.

The first solved itself pretty easily. Our basketball coaches have a student with a consumer level DV camera tape each game. That video feed is also fed to a VCR deck where the game is taped for the opposing team’s coach. It was a no-brainer to use that camera feed as it’s always there and is operated by a student who handles following the action as it moves up and down the court.

The second was networking. Our camera post was above the seats and away from press-row. Luckily, there was a network drop right near our area for the Athletics staff to do stats (and live stats) and to print out stat sheets, so the addition of a networking switch was incidental. Connectivity solved.

Finally – how do we send out the video?

After looking at several options, including some pay-options, I settled on using uStream to handle the load.

First, it’s free. Second, they offered many great features including the ability to customize a page on their end to host the games (though embedding is available), a multiuser chat room, the ability to stream live as well as record games for repeat viewing, and an easy to use web-based streaming interface.

In fact, here’s a video of a women’s basketball game. As you can see, the video quality is pretty good.

Our setup was pretty simple—we ran a firewire cable from the camera to our Macbook. We’d log into uStream and since everything is browser based, setup was a snap and we were up and running quickly and easily. This ease-of-use is also important as I couldn’t be at every game. With an easy system like uStream, Athletics staff and their student assistants could get the stream online and going without me, which is great. Here’s a photo of our setup. Clicking on it will take you to a page at Flickr with some notes.

We did a few games as a test, and only advertised it on the Athletics home page. For our first few games, we had sustained crowds of 30-40. With some success under our belt, we did a mass email to basketball alumni as well as included news about the stream on our online alumni community. For the rest of the season, we often had stream visitors in the 150-200 person range. They were vocal supporters in the chatroom, asking questions of each other and commenting on the game action.

I too was in the chatroom, constantly updating the score of the game in real time as well as the time left on the clock. We never found a good way to do graphics on the screen, as Chris Pirillo does for example.

My goal for the fall sports is to do add in play-by-play audio. Our local radio station broadcasts the football and men’s basketball games, and it’d be nice to add that audio the mix. I’d also like to look into adding graphics to the feed.

Overall, the technology worked very well and we’re looking at live streaming other events on campus. If you’re looking to stream not only sporting events, but other campus happenings, I’d highly recommend uStream.