Joe Mansour will blog about UStream in his weekly round-up of the conservatives bloggers briefing but I want to weigh in.

Brad Hunstable is the founder of UStream.tv provides a platform for anyone with a webcam or video camera to stream/broadcast live video through the Internet.

The premise: "People want to broadcast their message to dozens, hundreds, and thousands of people at once. This technology has not been available for FREE for consumers until now. We monetize traffic with sponsoring and advertising on the site."

Bits and pieces dashed throughout the conversation from Brad which caught my ear:
* UStream went public in March 2007 and since then has enjoyed good growth.
* Work with both sides of the political aisle. Of note, streamed the Barack/Oprah joint-appearance and Mitt Romney's speech on mormonism.
* James Kotecki of the Politico streamed via UStream from the Iowa Caucus.
* Long Tail streams: High school football games, family gatherings, church services, and individual streams.
* Big announcement coming in two weeks which involves the Republican Party. Would not tell us more about this deal. I'll dig in and try and scoop it. (Note: Brad said he will not be replicating this deal with the Democratic Party.)
* Looking to add more debate-esque features where two streams run simultaneously.
* Similar to Stickam, but with a much more conservative brand (less risque content, e.g., no nudity and nothing illegal permitted).

MY THOUGHTS
I like UStream. You and I should have a way to broadcast our message and this platform provides that at a cost that fits the budget.

I do have one concern/issue with UStream and that's the problem of jumpy/buffering video. In other words, when I login from a high-speed connection, the video always seems spotty. It's kind of like listening to your favorite record and hearing it skip beat after beat.

It's frustrating. But as Brad noted in our discussion, it might not be the *fault* of UStream.

In fact, I asked Brad about his server capacity - and how they plan to address this issue - and he said:

"We have scaled robustly, focused on it early on. There are inherent challenges - Internet connections from the users to UStream and then from UStream back to a user. Romney's case had the volume too high (gain) which distorted the audio and they didn't have the proper upload bandwidth speed for a proper connection. We're there on our end and we're working to help make the system more "dummy-proof" for broadcasting users."

I've got a number of speaking opportunities coming up in the near future so I'm going to give it a shot. Stay tuned.