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Ever heard of make.tv? It's a brilliant service that makes live streaming for non-professionals pretty easy. Its services can be compared to Mogulus and Ustream.tv.

I've actually used the CDN and the player of make.tv once or twice. I don't use the virtual studio and the webbased encoder. Rather, I encode with a dedicated encoder box running Flash Media Encoder (which is for rent, by the way), and I preproduce the audio and video signals with the equipment in the mobile TV studio that I built for Engage!

But I have advised make.tv and their webbased visual studio to contacts and clients who did not have the need for maximum quality and reliability, nor the means to rent professional equipment, and who just wanted a simple stream with some switching between angles and possibly some graphics.

Today make.tv announced, in an email to its users, a number of important changes. Advertisements will be inserted in the streams. But the most important one, is that free account holders will not be able to stream (or record) more than 30 minutes per day.

I really don't understand this move. Looking at the website of make.tv, it doesn't really seem that they have a very large userbase. I really think they need to keep free accounts as attractive as possible to get more people and companies to try out and really start using their amazing technology, which they've obviously been working very hard on.

Some months ago, make.tv announced a new pricing structure, also imposing limits on free accounts. However, they changed their mind just in time and cancelled the new prices. Now they seem to swing back in an attempt to make users pay for the make.tv services. I seriously wonder whether this is a clever move.

Business accounts, without adds and with unlimited stream duration, start at 99 euro per month with a minimum contract period of 1 month.