Ustream is great for metrics, but you will pay the price $$

We have been using Ustream for about 5 years now to broadcast our temple's live stream. They had all the features we were looking for including: embedding current and past streams on our website, chat feature, analytics, and much more. Ustream allowed us to reach out congregants in ways that we never dreamed of. We especially liked the ability for iPhone and iPad users to watch the stream using the Ustream app or on our website.

Since Ustream is on the IBM network, this definitely allows for uninterrupted live streaming. Even if your plan runs out because you have so many concurrent live streaming viewers, your plan will automatically rollover. We have never had any issues where the server was overloaded and seemed to always have good encoding results.

We have benefited from the SD_CDN layer, which allowed for over 2,000 concurrent viewers to effortlessly watch our live stream. This is, of course, do to the nature of their huge servers and redundancies. If we were using a smaller company's server, we would be more hesitant, but this added an extra layer of comfort for us.

The live streaming metrics were a huge reason why we paid for Ustream. This allowed us to create actionable insights of our viewership. Especially when you are trying to make the live streamers part of the community, you want as much information as possible to better the e-relationship. This was a huge success.

We have never used IBM's live captioning feature.