Remember CoverItLive? We’ve used them so many times for live blogging, mainly because they were free and for the features, it was pretty good (until it couldn’t handle the load of so many people liveblogging, and crashing all the time). Well now, they’ve decided to go paid-only, meaning that small publishers will now have to find other avenues to live cover events.
“CoveritLive is introducing new monthly subscription plans based on active usage. These plans provide customers full access to all of CoveritLive’s Premium features – previously unavailable to Basic plan customers — including event feeds, event groups and homepages, live webcam and access to the CoveritLive API,” it said in a letter.
All ‘Basic’ users – the free customers – will transition to a trial plan on July 1. You will be allowed to use CoverItLive still for free, but you will be limited to 25 users. This, however, won’t be enforced until July 1 – so it isn’t all that bad for those covering it for WWDC and E3.
However, the fact is that they are ending the free service pretty much means that small publishers and niche sites are scrambling to find services to continue live coverage. It’s pretty much a hassle – though, some people have offered alternatives.
We’ve switched to Twitter for some live event coverages after CoverItLive pretty much screwed us over – for example, I tweeted live from the Herald Sun event that detailed the paywall (via my personal account, and Tom and Stewart retweeted everything), but even that has problems (such as the tweet limit and character limits).
So, anyone have any other suggestions on how to cover live events?