Starting Friday April 2 at 9am ET, three volunteers will be living in solitary confinement as part of a National Geographic experiment exploring what effects the 8 x 10 cell has on the human mind. This online broadcast is in partnership with the National Museum for Crime and Punishment. Watch three different feeds of their confinement at http://livestream.com/ngsolitaryconfinement

According to National Geographic, more than 80,000 Americans are estimated to be in solitary confinement; some live there for years and in some cases decades. Cut off from human contact, some say it’s the only way for correctional officers to safely handle the worst prisoners, but others claim it amounts to psychological torture. This day & age, the world is hyper-connected to the flow of information. This event will hopefully display what’s it like to be suddenly cut off from social contact and experience the claustrophobic isolation of solitary confinement.

The volunteers (James, Laura, and Rick) will open a window into that experience during their confinement. Each cell replicates the “lowest level” of solitary in many prisons across the united States: no TV, or reading material and minimal human contact. Meals are served through a slot in the door. Participants allowed daily solitary exercise and a brief shower. Their experiences are shared via outgoing tweets (no incoming) while a camera streams 24/7.

National Geographic reminds us that this is not meant to be an authentic replication of punitive solitary confinement, with one profound departure being that each participant stays only up to one week, and can opt out anytime. The intention is to provide an “everyman” perspective into the social and claustrophobic isolation that are hallmarks of solitary confinement. The goal is to spark greater conversation on this widely used and controversial penal practice as a complement to the Sunday April 11 premiere of “Explorer: Solitary Confinement” on the National Geographic Channel.

To learn more, visit the official site at http://www.explorersolitary.com.

UK electronic outfit Hot Chip will host a live performace on Friday, February 5 in celebration of the release of their upcoming full-length album titled One Life Stand (Feb. 9, Astralwerks). The band will be performing selections from the new album, giving their fans an exclusive first listen.

Hot Chip is back with their stunning fourth studio album One Life Stand, which is being released on February 9 on Astralwerks Records. The album sees a proliferation of influences as diverse as the burgeoning UK funky scene to soul music, modern R&B, Northern Soul, Gospel, Golden Age Electronica, House, the sounds of Arthur Russell, Prince and Theo Parish. These influences all sit effortlessly alongside the band’s signature pop aesthetics, wild electronics, off kilter beats and intoxicating musical experimentation in a way that only Hot Chip can execute.

This exclusive live broadcast can be watched at http://livestream.com/hotchip. For more information on Hot Chip, visit their official MySpace Music profile at: http://www.myspace.com/hotchip.

Irish rock band Ash has partnered with Livestream to broadcast an exclusive performance streaming live from the band’s own Atomic Heart Studio in NYC.

On February 3, at 3:00pm EST/12noon PST, fans can tune in to Ash’s Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/ash), website (http://www.ash-official.com), or Livestream.com (http://www.livestream.com/ash) to view the broadcast.

Immediately following the performance, the members of Ash—Tim Wheeler, Mark Hamilton and Rick McMurray — will interact with their fans via a live Q+A session where they will answer questions submitted via Twitter and Facebook.

In October 2009 Ash launched the A-Z Series, a new approach to record releases.  The ultimate singles band will deliver the ultimate singles collection – a yearlong series of bi-weekly single releases, with limited edition collectors’ vinyl.  The A-Z Series will see Ash release 26 singles in one year. The first taster was a free download of Return Of White Rabbit, a refreshing electro take on the unstoppable Ash formula.

The unique subscription service runs from the band’s website and own label Atomic Heart Records and its launch was promptly followed by another Ash innovation: the A to Z Tour.   The band embarked on an alphabetical tour of the UK, a brave trip around the British Isles from Aldershot to Zennor, bringing their tunes, new and old, to some of the nation’s lesser-known music venues.  This April and May, Ash return to some more familiar venues in the UK as they visit cities like Cambridge, London, Oxford and Glasgow.

The US awaits a North American tour, but until then, we can tune in to catch this exclusive live performance on February 3 at 3pm EST/12noon PST.  The A-Z Series subscription is available for purchase on Ash’s website:  WWW.ASH-OFFICIAL.COM

With Livestream as the exclusive streaming provider of the event on February 3, the player for the webcast can be embedded anywhere. Integration with Facebook and Twitter allows viewers to engage in an online conversation with other fans and the band.

NEW YORK (Jan 8, 2009)– The National Lacrosse League (NLL) today announced that the entire 2010 season will once again be broadcast live for free on the NLL Network. New features have been added on the league’s 12 team sites allowing viewers to seamlessly interact using Facebook and Twitter while viewing the games. Fans will also be able to broadcast games from their Facebook page or any other website by embedding their team’s channel on the site (http://www.nll.com/live-bandits.htm).

At the heart of the NLL Network is a grid of 12 channels streaming 24/7 online at NLL.com. NLL team websites as well on other lacrosse focused websites and blogs will also broadcast high-quality online video NLL content free of charge including live games, features, behind the scenes action, dance team auditions and player interviews.

The NLL Network is powered by Livestream, the most powerful live broadcast platform on the Internet.
“Last season the NLL became the first pro sports league to virally broadcast live games, said NLL Commissioner George Daniel. “This year, Livestream’s new features allow viewers to interact on Facebook and Twitter while enjoying the games, further enhancing the viewing experience for our fans. Thanks to Livestream, we are very proud to be the first pro sports league to fully integrate social media with live game broadcasts. This is the perfect broadcast medium for our young and growing fan base. ”

“We are extremely pleased that the NLL has once again chosen Livestream Premium to power the NLL Network,” said Max Haot, Co-founder and CEO of Livestream. “The NLL Network continues to demonstrate the power of social media in sports and is yet another significant application of the Livestream Premium platform.”
Games may be subject to blackout restrictions.

NEW YORK (Dec. 23, 2009) – Bay-Area native Brett Dennen has partnered with Livestream to broadcast an exclusive New Year’s Eve performance at the Fox Theater in Oakland presented by Life is good and Another Planet Entertainment.

Starting December 31th at 8:30PM PST, fans can tune in to Brett’s Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/brettdennen), Website (http://www.brettdennen.net), or Livestream.com (http://www.livestream.com/brettdennenalolive) to view the broadcast. Joining Brett are Brushfire Recording artist and neighbors ALO, plus several local musicians at a party destined to be the Bay-Area kick-off to 2010.

To kickoff this special New Years Eve performance, Brett will also interact with his fans on Livestream, with a special Q+A session from his rehearsals on December 30th at 3PM PST. The performance at the newly renovated theater marks Brett’s first local headline since selling out two nights at the legendary Fillmore. He also recently engaged thousands at the Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival in Golden Gate Park and supported Jason Mraz for a sold out show at Berkeley’s Greek Theatre.

This show completes a highly successful year for Brett supporting his most recent release Hope For The Hopeless, which appropriately begins with Bay-Area homage “San Francisco”. Closing the year with a broadcast presented by Life is good makes perfect sense. Brett’s 54-city winter-spring tour was featured Life is good as a partner, and both Brett and ALO played for tens of thousands at Life is good Festivals in Boston, St. Louis and San Francisco in the summer and fall. Their vocal support for the Life is good Kids Foundation throughout the year helped this nonprofit raise over $900,000 in 2009 for children facing life-threatening conditions.

With Livestream as the exclusive streaming provider, the player for the webcast can be embedded anywhere. Integration with Facebook and Twitter allows viewers to engage in an online conversation with other fans and the band. The performance will also be encoded for the iPhone, making the broadcast accessible to over a million iPhone users with a 3G wireless connection at http://iphone.livestream.com/.

Event Organizers and Livestream provide revelers around the world with a backstage pass and opportunity to participate in the world famous Times Square New Year’s Eve celebration!

New York, NY (December 16, 2009) — The Times Square Alliance and Countdown Entertainment, co-organizers of New Year’s Eve in Times Square, joined by Livestream, announced a new international six and a half hour web event from the Times Square New Year’s Eve Celebration.

The webcast will be streamed live simultaneously on TimesSquareNYC.org; Livestream.com/2010, Facebook.com/TimesSquareNYC and many other websites. Viewers can tune in to watch and chat live online. The video solution is integrated with social media tools Twitter and Facebook, as well as live blogging tool CoverItLive, allowing the New Year’s Eve producer to engage participants, interact with their audience, and viewers to virtually share the moment with others. Viewers will also be able to access the webcast on their iPhones at iphone.livestream.com/2010.

Online publishers will additionally be able to embed the Livestream video player along with its social media tools on their sites and make the webcast available to their communities.

Four co-hosts will cover all the action in Times Square from the 6pm Ball Raising ceremony to the hourly practice countdowns, stage performances, handouts, special guests and the midnight Ball Drop! For the first time, worldwide viewers will be able to participate in the celebration while focusing on five separate insider story lines throughout the night.

ONE WORLD REVEALED – tells the story behind the million revelers who make the pilgrimage to Times Square to be part of the global celebration at the Crossroads of the World. The co-hosts will seek out revelers from across the globe to discover their personal stories and share their energy and excitement to be celebrating the New Year in Times Square. At New Year’s Eve BlogCast Headquarters at the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square, the program will follow the symbolic journey across the globe using a large world map to showcase the people who traveled to Times Square to celebrate together as the Ball drops. The worldwide audience will be encouraged to challenge the co-hosts to seek out revelers from their home countries. “Is anyone from Iceland here?”

WHAT IT TAKES – tells the story behind the Broadway curtain of actually producing New York City’s largest annual celebration through time-lapse videos, voice-over narrations, animations, and interviews with event producers and directors of key departments. The co-hosts and worldwide audience will discover not only the tremendous amount of work and state-of the-art technology but also the extraordinary personalities involved in the Times Square New Year’s Eve celebration. The worldwide audience will be encouraged to ask questions from cabling to confetti, staging to pyrotechnics, video production to Ball Dropping; and the co-hosts will find the answers! “How many workers does it take to screw in a light bulb on the Times Square Ball?” Answer – none because the Ball no longer has light bulbs.

PHOTOMANIA – tells the story visually of the worldwide audience participating in this global celebration at the Crossroads of the World. The co-hosts will encourage the international audience to twitpic their New Year’s Eve party photos to the New Year’s Eve BlogCast Headquarters at the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square. These photos will appear in the live Broadcast. Throughout the celebration, five photos will be selected for the global audience to vote for their favorite. The winning photos will appear atop One Times Square on the giant Toshiba video screen directly beneath the New Year’s Eve Ball. “Hey, look there’s Grandma in Times Square!”

TIMES SQUARE – tells the story behind Times Square and its world famous New Year’s Eve celebration. The party started here in 1904 with over 200,000 revelers celebrating the New Year. Today, Times Square is famous not only for New Year’s Eve but also the bright lights of Broadway, the streetscape of spectacular signs, and huge public gatherings throughout its history. The co-hosts and worldwide audience will be entertained by fascinating tales of Times Square told by the people working and living in Times Square. Moreover, the international audience will be encouraged to share their Times Square stories on the live blogcast. “What did you do on your first visit to Times Square?”

THE FIRST OFFICIAL NEW YEAR’S EVE LIVE BLOGCAST HEADQUARTERS - tells the story behind the bloggers, guest panelists, moderators, and commentators working at the LIVE BlogCast Headquarters located at the Official Times Square New Year’s Eve party hosted by the Event Organizers at the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square. BlogCast Headquarter is the central nervous system of the global celebration to encourage participation, collaboration, and dialogue with every viewer. The goal is more than passively broadcasting Times Square New Year’s Eve around the world; but to actively engage the world to virtually celebrate together. The New Year’s Eve LIVE BlogCast Headquarters provides the rare opportunity to bring the world together to reflect on the past, hope for the future and celebrate today!

WHERE TO SEE THE SHOW & PICK-UP THE WIDGET
The Times Square 2010 Live Webcast/Blogcast will begin at 5:50pm on December 31, 2009 and end at 12:20am on January 1, 2010. The show will be available at TimesSquareNYC.org; Livestream.com/2010, Facebook.com/TimesSquareNYC and many other websites. Additionally, the Event Organizers and Livestream are offering widgets of varying sizes for bloggers, webmasters, and digital media outlets to embed in their own sites as a source of fun and entertaining content on New Year’s Eve. For more information on the variety of non-commercial widgets available and the embedding codes, please visit www.TimesSquareNYC.org or www.livestream.com/2010.

NEW YORK (Dec. 7, 2009) — Rock music giant Thirty Seconds to Mars and Virgin Records have chosen Livestream to broadcast an exclusive live Q&A with the band in support of their new album, This is War on Wednesday, Dec. 9, at 5 p.m. PST/8 p.m. EST.

This is War is the follow-up to their multi-platinum second album, A Beautiful Lie, and is set for release on Dec. 8. The album’s first single “Kings & Queens” soared to the top of the alternative radio charts where it is currently #3 and was lauded by Billboard Magazine, which proclaimed: “Kings & Queens” is epic rock at its most affecting.”

During the broadcast, the band will answer questions from a host as well as fans who have submitted questions to their local radio stations. Fans will be able to watch the live broadcast on the band’s Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/thirtysecondstomars), Web site (http://www.thirtysecondstomars.com), and at Livestream.com (http://www.livestream.com/thirtysecondstomars).

The performance will also be encoded for the iPhone, making the broadcast accessible to over a million iPhone users with a 3G wireless connection at http://iphone.livestream.com.

With Livestream as the exclusive streaming provider, the player widget for the webcast can be embedded anywhere. Integration with Facebook and Twitter allows viewers to engage in an online conversation with others fans and the band.

NEW YORK (Dec. 2, 2009) — Chart-topping musical phenomenon Tori Amos and media giant Universal Republic have partnered with Livestream to broadcast an exclusive in-store session of cuts from the new ‘Midwinter Graces’ album live here on Friday December 11, at 3 p.m. EST.

Universal Republic, a division of Universal Music Group, is celebrating the release of her first ever seasonal album with the event, during which Amos will also interact with her online audience live at http://www.facebook.com/toriamos and http://www.livestream.com/toriamos.

A follow-up to Amos’ critically acclaimed studio album, ‘Abnormally Attracted to Sin’, ‘Midwinter Graces’ finds her reworking and expanding on classic carols as well as developing some of her very own seasonal tracks.

Raised in the Baltimore area under the watchful eye of her Methodist minister father, Amos grew up playing holiday carols at Sunday services and Christmas Day celebrations in his church. These were the songs that gave a young Amos her first taste of music, and now almost 40 years later she gets her chance to re-imagine classics like “What Child, Nowell” and “Star of Wonder.”

With Livestream, the player widget for the webcast can be embedded anywhere. Integration with Facebook and Twitter allows social media users to engage in an online conversation with Amos. The performance will be encoded for the iPhone making the broadcast accessible to over a million iPhone users with a 3G wireless connection at http://iphone.livestream.com

NEW YORK (Nov. 17, 2009)— Today’s TEDxSF‘s next event, Creativity & Reinvention, will feature fascinating speakers, great music and more. TEDxSF has selected to broadcast the entirety of their event via Livestream, the leading broadcast platform and community for streaming media.

In the spirit of “ideas worth spreading,” TED has created TEDx. TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. Our event is called TEDx San Francisco where x equates to an independently organized TED event. At TEDx San Francisco, TEDTalks video and live speakers will combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events, including ours, are self-organized.

The speaker lineup includes Phil Hettema, a leader in experiential entertainment, who will explore “Immersion, engagement, storytelling and creativity.” Joining Hettema, Dr. Sam Wang from Princeton will explore “Willpower.” Walter McGuire, who led the Earth Day and Flex Your Power campaigns, will “Shock the Social Contract” and award-winning photojournalist Doug Menuez will present “Fearless Genius: How Silicon Valley Innovation Transformed the World.” In addition, the event features world-class musician’s Zoe Keating and Meklit Hadero, plus much more, including Ryan Wyatt, the head of scientific visualization at the Cal Academy’s Planetarium. Additional presentations include interactive play, creativity, photography and fashion.

Livestream allows the webcast to be embedded anywhere, including integration with Facebook and Twitter to allow users of the social media tools to engage in the ongoing conversation of TEDxSF. The conference is subsequently provided with immediate interaction with those viewers via the social stream, adding a new dimension to their live broadcast while further helping their message reach many thousands of viewers online.

The entire conference will also be live on the iPhone at http://iphone.livestream.com.

Watch the live event unfold at www.tedxsf.org, http://www.livestream.com/tedxsf or on your iPhone at http://iphone.livestream.com from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. PST/ 7p.m. to 11 p.m. EST.

For more information and to register for TEDxSF Creativity & Reinvention, visit http://www.tedxsf.org.

Horizon League conference basketball action begins tonight with Live action streamed on Livestream.com and HorizonLeagueNetwork.tv. More than 400 live events will be streamed by the Horizon League Network this year.

Livestream Chosen by Horizon League to Stream

Hundreds of Division 1 College Basketball Games Live

Exclusive Deal Expands Athletics Customer Base;

Follows Launch of Livestream Sports Solutions Division

NEW YORK (Nov. 9, 2009) –The Horizon League and WebStream Productions Inc. have chosen Livestream, the leading live Internet video platform, to broadcast hundreds of regular-season, NCAA Division 1 men’s and women’s college basketball games beginning November 13.

Under the exclusive deal, live game broadcasts will be available for free viewing at www.horizonleaguenetwork.tv along with regularly updated highlights and on-demand content.

“We are excited to partner with Livestream on the new Horizon League Network site. The power of their video platform including live streaming, on-demand content, automatic recording, archiving and APIs make Livestream the perfect fit for the Horizon League,” said John Servizzi, president of WebStream Productions.

The partnership is the latest in association with the recently launched Livestream Sports Solutions division, which is focused on delivering best-of-breed live streaming partnerships for athletic organizations. The Horizon League, with its perennial slate of NCAA Championship contenders, joins a growing number of leagues and networks that rely on Livestream for sports webcasting, including the CollegeFanz Sports Network, National Lacrosse League and the Kansas City Chiefs NFL franchise.

“This partnership with the Horizon League and WebStream Productions is yet another example of how Livestream technology is transforming the way sports organizations bring live video to their fans,” said Max Haot, CEO of Livestream. “We are excited to be working with WebStream Productions on their coverage of Horizon League athletics and look forward to helping other sports organizations do the same.”

“We are pleased to partner with WebStream Productions and Livestream to bring our fans and alumni a high-quality, live streaming video experience,” said Horizon League Commissioner Jonathan B. LeCrone. “The Horizon League Network is a vital marketing and communications platform. Our partners are helping us maximize its potential.”