Open Waves

Since it is a holiday week, I’m going to keep things on the lighter side, mostly because I have a lot to do before the long weekend. Also, I have a lot to do during the weekend, so I will not be posting here Thursday or Friday.

Anyway, a few months ago I found a site that lets you host free, live video from a web cam or any video source of your choice called Ustream.tv. The way it works is whenever you want to send your live feed to the web, you just plug in your camera to your computer and, once you have your account set up, log in and press “Go Live”. Of course, it has all the fun gadgets like chat and polls that run live alongside your video stream. You can also embed the player into your own website, as well as view it in Full Screen mode. The only downside so far is they don’t support Mac’s. I have not tested it on a Mac but I read in their forum that a lot of people are having problems. Hopefully this feature will arrive in the near future.

Another video site I found this week is Mogulus. Another free, web-based tool that lets you program and produce your very own live, web channel. I have tested it out and it is as easy if not easier than they say it is to use. Once you are signed up and logged in, you can immediately go live and start your production. You can mix together a live feed with previously recorded video that lets you transition smoothly back and forth. If you don’t have enough original content to start out, you can search and play YouTube videos. When you drag clips into your storyboard, you can either manually cue in the video clip of your choice or set it to auto produce, which plays your storyboard chronologically. You have other display options such as scrolling a ticker, and even using the full screen to show what’s coming up next. These other features can only be manually run; you cannot yet program them into your storyboard. What they suggest is to record a daily “show”, then set it to automatically run at the top of your storyboard with your other videos. The only thing I have found is that if you want to broadcast live video, you better have extremely high quality video equipment and a very high speed internet connection. Anyone who has tried this and been able to stream acceptable video quality, let me know what you are using.