A Livestation alert in my email inbox confirmed what we always knew, that offering live streaming of news channels with different perspectives is compelling viewing.

“Wow, an incredible difference it is to watch news from outside the bubble,” writes Steve in his post The US., Outside-In on the blog Noise is Information.

Clearly, from what the Livestation viewer writes, being able to see an alternative point of view from Russia Today and Al Jazeera has offered him a totally different take on domestic and world events.

Commenting on a Russia Today piece which focused on the protests outside the Republican Convention, he writes, “Russian television views American protests the way American television views Chinese protests… in the Russian portrayal, the protesters are "voters” who have legitimate grievances, and the police are heavy-handed and violent in their repression… If you’ve seen any mention of the protests on American TV, it’s been focused almost exclusively on a few smashed windows, and is heavily biased toward the police perspective," he writes.

The Livestation viewer then flicked from Russia Today to Al Jazeera where he viewed a report from an Al Jazeera correspondent who “actually goes to Hanoi” to visit the site where John McCain’s plane was shot down and finds “the old man who, as a 17-year-old, pulled McCain from the lake into which he had parachuted.”According to the writer, the Al Jazeera correspondent then spoke to the head of the prison where McCain was held and another perspective on the story emerges.

For me, as a news guy, this is the fun bit of the project, particularly as we have a stack of channels lined up to stretch that perspective fix to totally new levels. And on the functionality front, in a few weeks there’ll be the multi-screen layer release offering Livestation viewers an ability to compare and contrast those perspectives at the same time.