Livestation goes dark

Livestation, a streaming service that offered a huge variety of live news channels for free and for purchase, shut down as of three days ago. I may well be the only one on here who cares, but I thought I'd share anyway:



http://livestation.com/home

It's sad to see it go. Early on, Livestation was one of the few ways you could watch AJE in the U.S. I remember when Riz Khan's show would even direct people to it and would field questions from the chatrooms when they used to have them. It was pretty cool to ask a question in it and then see Riz ask it to the guest just mere seconds later, as what happened to me a few times. I was a subscriber for many years, mostly just so I could watch Euronews in the U.S., but I'd also use it to watch CNN and the BBC while living and traveling in Europe.

I found it strange when I got a refund email about a week ago. I suppose there's not much of a business case for this kind of service when most channels have turned to their own streaming solutions either on their own websites or on YouTube. The only channel I'm really missing now is Euronews, which is still a little hard to get in the U.S. The English stream on their website and YouTube channel is still geoblocked. I found a live stream on Dailymotion, but I'm not sure how legit it is, and it's not as high quality as the Livestation one.

I never even know about that place. Shame.

Wasn't it also used as a host for local news stations? Where anything short of a mess up you would never notice that it was a Livestream.

Nope, Livestream and Livestation are two different services.

If it's this one than it's an official stream. Only 480p though.

Early on, it had a feature where you could submit live stream links to be added as channels. There were definitely some local outlets submitted through there. I also think their original plan was to have as many possible TV channels carried on it. They eventually did away with that when they went to a web-based service primarily offering only the news streams they carried themselves.

As someone who worked for Livestation as a Chatroom moderator (we were called Chatbouncer) It is unfortunate to hear LS is closing, but not surprising as news channels are streaming channels themselves thus eliminating the "middleman" in the equation. From personal experience, it was difficult to moderate a chat room during the Riz Khan show and during live coverage because of how heated the conversation got, but it was a wonderful experience overall

They ultimately did away with that feature just before eliminating the free version of the service. Originally they had three feeds for the free service-- HQ, Medium and Low Quality, with the one HD feed available for the subscription service