Koozoo, a live streaming service, launches Thursday in the San Francisco Bay Area and Austin, Texas. It basically allows users to catch a snippet of video, live-streaming it to anyone who's checking the app. It can be used to check the weather at a destination, lines at a restaurant or even traffic moving onto the freeway.
Basic users can take brief clips of video. Advanced users can take an old cameraphone, download and run the app, then mount the camera onto their office or home window to stream footage of a certain area. The latter streams only activate when someone tries to watch the feed. Resolution and speed of the video depend on the phone's camera and quality of the Wi-Fi connection. The service is free and available on iOS and Android devices, but the company may add paid services in the future, such as saving live feeds.
Early adopters have used Koozoo to check hyper-local weather, but it has potential to live-stream other events — sports, for example. Instead of watching a game on TV or finding a place to stream online, simply hop onto Koozoo and someone could be streaming the game you want. If you don't like the angle, and there's more than one person live-streaming, you can hop onto someone else's feed. Of course, this will be in a future in which Koozoo really takes off and establishes itself.
One of the main concerns is privacy. Drew Sechrist, Koozoo's CEO, told TechCrunch that the policy is to only allow recording in public spaces, and that prohibited video will be edited out. All feeds will be screened before going live, TechCrunch reports, and users can vote feeds up or down depending on how interesting they are. Koozoo also hired an advisory board to weigh in on security issues, including Facebook's former public policy director, Tim Sparapani.
Koozoo's success will depend on the size and dedication of its network. It could potentially be one of the most useful apps out there, allowing users to see ahead of time the conditions of certain places, to access a home camera when abroad, or even to see a new city in a foreign place.
“My ultimate goal is to walk down the street in Tokyo from anywhere in the world,” Sechrist told Wired.
