That ustream again - and other stuff

[Rainer Straschill <moinsound@googlemail.com>]

So that ustream thing is catching on rather quickly (I think it was
Jim who said "that's the new youtube" or something), so I'm wondering:

What are your experiences with it, or with other similar services, and
how do they compare?

I have been exchanging ideas with fellow list member Jeff Duke, and we
also did a (successful) test run combining justin.tv and Ninjam. The
general summary of our experiences (in a nutshell):

There are four services known to us for video streaming: ustream,
justin, mebeam and stickam.

It seems that ustream and justin are made for broadcast, while stickam
and mebeam focus on the video group chat application.

Both ustream and justin allow you to use FME (standalone free flash
media encoder) to work together with their service. However, the
implementation is different: while with justin it's sufficient to just
connect to your stream with FME, with ustream you need to logon, open
a broadcast concole, have that pickup the FME stream and work from
there.

Ustream has some stability issues in that configuration and will often
not start up properly. (Which is a pity, because it's the only way to
get stereo audio).

Ustream has that cool "co-host" feature. A workaround: with justin,
you can just take several widgets of individual streams and combine
them on one web page (successfully tested).

At least ustream and justin.tv have problems with some browsers (most
specifically IE).

Summarizing, here's a quote from a message I sent to Jeff:
                Main Goal               HQ Video possible               
Stereo Audio    stable  co-host
ustream broadcast                       X                                
(w FME)                   -              X
justin  broadcast                       X                                
(w FME)                   X              -
stickam vchat                           -                                  
   -                    ?              -
mebeam  vchat                           -                                  
   -                    ?              -

MY QUESTIONS TO YOU:

1. alternatives to these services which allow for combining video
feeds? (With the exception of that, justin really works fine for me)
2. your experiences using ustream with FME (please also mention platform)

Thanks,

             Rainer