Yesterday after seeing ads injected into my video stream I asked the question in the Ustream.TV forum if there was a way to shut the ads off. The reply was no. The moderator then closed the message topic from further comment.

Seeing he closed the message topic I posted a second message that outlined my concerns and hoped to get a constructive conversation going. Well they not only closed that discussion before anyone could respond they actually deleted the comment in order to stifle debate. This was a second slap in the face.

The question that needs to be asked does Ustream.TV want to have a conversation with it’s family of content contributors on their own site or do they want to have the conversation here?

I find it very curious in over 2 hours of viewing shows that are featured on the main page of Ustream.TV that none of those shows has the advertising we saw yesterday popping up. But as you dig in deeper, and leave the front page the advertising is very apparent.

What it appears they are doing, is making the shows on the front page look inviting without the intrusive advertising, and then sticking advertising into the content producers streams that are not on the front page of the website. Good strategy if you do not want to scare off perspective new content producers.

I have received a Twitter from someone at Ustream saying they would like to do a call. I will talk with them but they need to understand that they need to start being a bit more transparent and be willing to take the heat of criticism in their own forums. More as this develops.

To be fair I found out that Mogulus has started doing the same type of ad injection as well. Which really disappoints me that neither of these two sites informed their content producers or have given us a pro-offering that we could pay to play without advertising.