The next step in the video sharing and user generated content revolution is live video broadcasting. We’ve previously looked at four live video broadcasting solutions currently available to the man on the street (or man sat at his computer).  

These four are uStream, Mogulus, Operator11 and YourCams. However, the problem with these solutions is that the production effects are very limited leaving with you with just yourself and a webcam to keep your audience entertained.

If you are a Mac owner then CamTwist can help liven up your broadcast with some production effects (similar software for windows is WebcamMax).

CamTwist for Mac in a Sentence

CamTwist brings you a variety of live production tools including picture-in-picture, watermarking, desktop sharing, RSS feeds, slideshows, videos and a host of visual effects to your web broadcasts.

Over the past couple of years the internet has changed drastically on three fronts:

1. Broadband Video content has exploded and become more accessible.
2. User Generated Content has also exploded as many sites have allowed users to contribute to their content This can take many forms such as through videos (youtube), commenting (blogs), asking and answering questions (yahoo answers), adding pictures (flickr), or actually editing and writing content for the site (wikipedia).
3. Social networking has leveraged the web not only as a place to receive information but also as a means to network and interact with like minded individuals and to work together for a common goal — like highlighting interesting news on digg.com for example.

Now arriving on the scene to bring it all together is KickApps, a service that lets you combine web video, user generated content and social networking and embed this functionality within your own site.