After I did several test, see also my previous post, I still was disappointed with the quality of the video signal.

A time ago there was an update of the Live Station software.  The quality was already much better, but the sound was still bad.  For around 80% of the time the sound was send and pieces of the spoken text was missing.

I have taken some screen captures.  So you can see more of it :

Very good video quality	Quality was good
Bad quality	Bad quality
worst quality

Although I have here the Turbonet account from Telenet which has a download speed of 20 MBit/sec.  So this should be enough for broadcasting.

So, I'm patiently waiting for a newer version.  But I still think there are some performance issues.  It was a pity that last time they did a spike test I hadn't the time to do this test.  So I hope I can do this test the next time.

As I was beta tester of Joost, which was a good product for that time.  I came aware around november 2007 about Microsoft Livestation.  I subscribed to it to get a technical Beta account.  In January I got an e-mail that I was selected and should receive in a couple of weeks the invitation.

Well a few days ago it was that far.  I received my invitation to become a tester of MS Livestation.

Installation

So I downloaded the software, installed it. You can install the software on 5 different PC's.

First impression

And Oh boy, my first impression was not that good.

The startup is very slowly.  And when it was started up, I always got the message that the signal is not available for the default channel.  So I start looking for another channel.  Another disappointment.  They only got a category for news today and there are only a few broadcast stations available.  So after selecting BBC world it started, but the quality was crap.  Comparing it to Joost, then Joost is in very high quality.  The quality of Livestation is that poor, that you only see big blocks which becomes in a result that you don't see what's streaming.  After a few seconds I got again the message that the signal is unavailable.

Final first conclusion

Microsoft has still a lot of work to do especially for

• Quality of the broadcast
• availibility of the signal
• And content

Although I must say, they state on the website that there's not a lot content for the moment, but they will add soon more content.

I also think that the problem is that the moment I got the e-mail I directly installed the software and tried it. Just like a whole bunch of other testers.  So I will try it again over a couple of days and see.  But if it works better then, I suppose they have to do alot an performance tuning.