Argus Radio reached 80,000 concurrent viewers of its live video stream of police clashing with protestors in Ferguson.Argus Radio/Screenshot by Joan E. Solsman/CNET

For many people in the US, their first glimpse of the violence in Ferguson, Mo., came via an Internet live stream.

The shooting death of Michael Brown -- a black, unarmed 18-year-old -- by a white police officer on Aug. 9 triggered days of protests and violent clashes with law enforcement in the past few weeks. As militarized police kept news organizations' satellite trucks at a distance and members of the press were handcuffed alongside protestors, video taken by on-the-ground citizens and quickly posted on the Internet became the lens through which many saw the melee.

Ferguson LiveStreamer Bassem Masri Doing interview with Chris Hayes Fox2

Millions of people watched the drama unfold on sites like Livestream and Ustream, services that let anyone record and then broadcast quality video live over the Internet. The platforms have attracted more and more viewers as CNN and the other mainstream media outlets use on-the-ground footage -- sometimes borrowed from Livestream and Ustream themselves -- to augment their own reporting.

Factors like the improving audio-visual capabilities of today's smartphones andtablets, high-speed mobile networks, and increased usage of platforms like Twitter are hastening the rise of live-streamed video over the Internet as a way to document civil unrest around the world. In Ferguson, these factors contributed to crowdsourced news reporting on a scale we haven't seen in the US before now. While Brown's death was tragically premature, the subsequent protests came at the right time for live-streaming to come into its own as a news tool.

"The inability to hide -- for the government or anyone to hide anything newsworthy -- it's only starting," said Max Haot, chief executive of Livestream. "What's really unique is how much faster and bigger [Ferguson] became. It shows the impact live-streaming is having and will have in the future."

Citizen footage widened the lens of civil unrest in Ferguson, Mo., and it brought live-streaming to popular attention in the US unlike any confrontation has before.

http://www.cnet.com/news/how-ferguson-brought-live-streams-into-the-mainstream/