We’ve recently released the much anticipated Livestream Chat Update for our new Livestream Player and Channel Pages. This update includes many important and highly requested features below:

New features:

• Toggle timestamp button.
• Clear all of a user’s messages from chat.
• When login is not required (default) you can either login with a nickname, or a livestream username & password.
• If you own the channel or are a member of the channel (configure in ”manage team” in the studio) or have been added to the chat moderator list you have access to moderation.

Moderation options:

• Moderator only chat (formerly Viewer Mute), only moderators can talk.
• Require Login forces everyone to login with a Livestream Account.
• Clear all chat messages.

User list:

• Remove moderators / ban users by clicking the X next to their name. (Only the channel owner can add/remove moderators).
• Manage user options by clicking on the username in the chat room.

User options:

• Grant / remove moderator privileges (only if you’re the owner of the channel).
• You can ban the user based on his IP address / Livestream Account (if login requirement is activated) / viewerId (same as the old chat).

Nothing says New Years like watching the ball drop in Times Square in New York City. While plane tickets and hotel rooms are expensive, Livestream, in partnership with The Times Square Alliance and Countdown Entertainment, will stream a six-and-a-half hour free web event. The event will start at 6 PM (ET) with the ball raising ceremony, practice countdowns, stage performances, handouts, special guests, and of course the midnight ball drop. Tune in at http://www.livestream.com/2010 or on your iPhone at http://www.iphone.livestream.com/2010 to witness the coming of the New Year in a true New York fashion.

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. Fans can tune in to Brett’s Facebook page, Web site, or Livestream.com Page to view the broadcast. In addition, ALO, plus several other local musicians will perform at a party. Brett will also interact with his fans on Livestream, with a special Q+A session from his rehearsals on December 30th at 3PM PST. Be a part of the concert on December 31th at 8:30PM PST/11:30PM EST.

New Years is one of the most eventful and anticipated times of the year—so why celebrate it just once? With New Year’s Nation, viewers can watch people from all different time zones, all over the world, celebrating the ball drop. The channel has setup more than 10,000 guests in 10 cities worldwide to capture their New Years celebrations, so that the entire Internet can enjoy the once-a-year spectacle.  Raise your champagne class at least four times at http://www.livestream.com/newyearsnation.

While the ball in NYC’s Times Square has long been the symbol of New Years, Manhattan, Kansas has their very own tradition—the Little Apple Ball Drop. KTKA 49, an ABC Kansas-based news affiliate, will stream the event live with the assistance of Livestream, marking the first time the Little Apple Ball Drop will appear before a grand, Internet audience. Check out http://www.livestream.com/ktka for a unique New Years experience.

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/.

We’ve narrowed down the hundreds of Channel Page Design Contest submissions to ten finalists!

Now it’s up to you, the Livestream Community, to select the winners. Please follow this link to vote for your favorite page. Voting ends Monday, December 28th at 11:30 pm EST. Then the votes will be tallied and the winners announced.

Thank you everyone who entered and good luck to the ten finalists.

The exclusive highlights from the premiere of Avatar on Wednesday, December 16th were featured on Livestream this past week.

Thousands tuned in to watch the Red Carpet events unfold for the sci-fi flick that took over ten years to create—and one that has already received nominations for four Golden Globe Awards, including Best Director and Best Motion Picture.

First developed in 1994, Avatar has long been considered director/writer James Cameron’s baby project, taking him more than a decade to perfect the script and develop the state-of-the-art camera technology needed for the revolutionary 3D formatting. The groundbreaking film stars Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, and many more.

If you missed out on the exciting premiere highlights, make sure to watch the on-going replay footage at http://www.livestream.com/avatar.

Watch the replay:

Here are some screenshots:

YouTube sensations Hank and John Green (as well as some of their most famous YouTube friends) are bringing their annual charity effort to Livestream today Thursday 12/17 at 12pm (ET).

The Project For Awesome is an annual charitable event in which thousands of YouTubers band together to take over YouTube.

“YouTube charts the most viewed, most discussed and most favorited videos of the day, and through collaborative team work, the Green brothers and the Project For Awesome team is able to blanket those lists with videos that raise money for various charities,” said Alan Lastufka, co-founder of DFTBA Records and one of the P4A chat hosts. “Each year has been more successful than the last, not just in money raised for the charities, but in the participation and feeling of community.”

This year, the YouTube celebs are taking their marathon broadcast (the P4A headquarters online) to Livestream, in which they will motivate and communicate with the community during the 24-hour event, beginning today at 12:00pm ET.

For more information on the Project For Awesome, visit http://www.projectforawesome.com/ and watch the live chat at http://www.livestream.com/projectforawesome!

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.

Livestream presented National Geographic Live’s “Distant Relatives,” a program that deconstructed and analyzed the seemingly forgotten roots of today’s hip-hop on Saturday, Dec. 12th at 7 pm (EST). The discussion featured renowned recording artists Nas and Damian ‘Jr. Gong’ Marley, as they identified the connection between modernized hip-hop and traditional reggae.

In addition, the other impressive panel members included Kool Herc, Rakim, Daddy U-Roy, King Jammy, Jeff Chang, Pat McKay, Waterflow and DJ Red Alert, with MTV’s VJ Sway hosting and moderating.

Despite hip-hop becoming a multibillion-dollar fixture in the music industry, its origins were much more pedestrian. It started in Africa, and made its way to the Caribbean and America via the slave trade. It became popularized in the mid-to-late-1900’s in New York City, and transformed into the new form and culture it is today.

The replay of “Distant Relatives” will be available for an entire month. If you missed out on the live event, you can watch it at http://www.livestream.com/distantrelatives.

Watch a clip from the event below:

And here are some screenshots of the player:

On National Geographic:

On Facebook:

On Livestream:

Submission for the Best Channel Page Design Contest ends tonight, Monday, Dec 14th at 11:30 pm EST. Please get your entries in. For those of you who have already submitted your channel page, we thank you. There have been some really great entries so far. For those of you who haven’t, click here to submit your channel page now.

The much anticipated Premiere of “Nine” will stream live on Tuesday, December 15th from the Ziegfeld Theater in New York City on Livestream at 6:45 pm (ET). The film, which is based off the 1982 smash-hit Broadway play, stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench, Fergie, Kate Hudson, Nicole Kidman, and Sophia Loren—all of whom will be in attendance at the Premiere. Other guests will include Donald Trump, Goldie Hawn, Lou Reed, Kate and Ashley Olsen, and many more. Take your place on the Red Carpet at http://www.livestream.com/ninepremiere.

Stonyfield’s Expedition Copenhagen Youth Correspondents have been showcasing a series of interviews with important people at the forefront of the climate change movement. Expedition Copenhagen will be led in part by internationally renowned polar explorer Will Steger, with Stonyfield Farm as the lead sponsor. Delegates will assume a leadership role in a regional climate campaign to pass strong climate legislation leading up to the international negotiations, and will also support the Will Steger Foundation Citizen Climate curriculum in schools across the United States.
They started the event on December 7th, and it will continue through the 18th on weekdays at 12 pm (EST)/9 am (PST). The series features a behind the scenes look at COP15 – the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009. Be a part of the movement at http://livestream.com/stonyfield.

Citizen journalism organization TheUpTake.org is covering the UN Climate Change Conference taking place from December 7th to the 18th in Copenhagen, Denmark. Anytime from 3:00am (ET) to 1:30pm (ET), people can view the historic and exclusive environmental discussions and interviews occurring on location, which will feature world leaders and environmentalists. See how The Uptake is using the Livestream technology in our blog post last week. Tune into http://livestream.com/theuptake to watch the world’s greatest eco-minds discuss the future of our environment.

BusinessBoomer Network is hosting the first season finale of its live, interactive web talk show at 6:00-7:30 pm (PST)/9:-00-10:30 pm (EST) on Tuesday, December 15, at Minna Gallery in San Francisco. It will feature conversations with leading San Francisco Bay Area social visionaries and innovators, including Kevin Jones, founder of Social Capital Markets, (www.socialcapitalmarkets.net), Good Capital (goodcap.net), The The Hub Bay Area (bayarea.the-hub.net), Sundeep Ahuja, co-founder and president of The Extraordinaries (www.beextra.org), and Jory Des Jardins co-founder of BlogHer (www.blogher.com). Learn about business from the best at http://www.livestream.com/bboomer.

UFC Heavyweight fighter Andrei “The PitBull” Arlovski will hold a press conference on Tuesday, December 15th from 9 pm to 10 pm (ET) to announce a special contract signing. Andrei, who was born in Minsk, Belarus, is a former UFC Heavyweight Champion MMA fighter. Step into the ring at http://www.livestream.com/andreiarlovski .