Dyyno, which allows its users to stream and record live video from any application on their desktops, is launching a major upgrade of its service today. The company’s service will now allow users to stream live and recorded video streams in full 1080p HD resolution. Dyyno has also dropped the price for personal accounts – which can stream HD video – to zero. These personal account support up to 100,000 concurrent viewers. Previously, these accounts started at $10 per month.
For the time being, Dyyno can only stream videos from Windows PCs. The company does offer a browser plugin for watching these videos on the Mac and Windows. The company’s CEO Raj Jaswa told us that a Mac client is on the company’s roadmap.
We took a closer look at the service’s features when the company launched in August. While the desktop client has evolved since then, the basic features remain the same.
In our tests, the service worked just as advertised and the image quality of the 1080p streams was very high. It takes a decent broadband connection to work well, however – the HD video streams take up about 3Mbps. Dyyno supports up to 30 frames per second and encodes its videos in H.264. The company does not automatically scale the video streams down for users with slower connections, though for on-demand video, content owners can choose different bitrates for their videos.
Running Dyyno’s desktop client is very easy. After installing the application, you just have to drag the Dyyno logo from the client to any window on your computer and it will automatically start to stream this video on your personal Dyyno page. In addition to live streaming, users can also create a “WebTV” channels that plays videos at a set time.
Requires a Plugin
The fact that it takes a browser plugin to run the service could be a roadblock for some potential users, however. On the other hand, no other service that we are aware of offers free 1080p live streaming.
Pricing
As Dyyno’s platform is based on a P2P architecture, it only makes sense for the company to offer the live streams for free. After all, the more users watch the stream, the easier it will be for Dyyno to deliver the video. The company does charge users who want to store more than 1GB of video for on-demand streaming on Dyyno’s servers $10 per month. Dyyno does not charge for bandwidth. The P2P architecture doesn’t lend itself for on-demand streaming, so Dyyno chose to charge for this aspect of its service.
The company also offers business channels for $100 month, which include a total of 10 video channels and up to 100GB of storage. The company’s high-end account, the Dyyno Broadcast station, costs $1,000 per month, and allows users to store an archive of up to 1,000GB of video and broadcast more than 100 concurrent video streams. Both the business and the broadcast accounts are stripped of all Dyyno’s branding. Dyyno plans to offer an ad revenue share model to companies that subscribe to these higher-end accounts and who want to make use of Dyyno’s on-demand streaming solutions.
