I just spent most of today with Chris Brogan, accompanying him to the Pulver offices in Long Island to be part of their 4 person audience watching Jeff and Chris’ live streaming video show on Ustream.tv
As I watched, I thought about corporations ( my clients ) that have invested thousands in live streaming technologies for their “town hall” meetings they show on their intranets. Ustream.tv opens the way for many more companies and individuals to now do the samething, in an extremely easy way.
At this point, anyone that has the unique URL Ustream assigns your stream can watch your live show, but that could change, allowing a company some control over who watches what they are putting out there.
I was thinking about all this in the park this morning walking with Henry, the potential that this gives groups that previously couldn’t afford live streaming. I remember when we would live stream a remote event, sometimes we had to rent a satellite truck. No more.
• Theather groups could stream their productions.
• Indie bands could put together fundraisers similar to LiveAid, with a link to a PayPal account, to raise money for Darfur.
• Local politicians could stream debates.
• gardenfork.tv could have a live call in show, similar to Car Talk on NPR.
The trick in all of this is getting people to log in at a specific time. The combined power of Jeff Pulver and Chris Brogan announcing on their blogs and Twitter that they will be live at noon certainly helps. I’ve already seen requests ( including one by steve garfield ) for the archived version of the Pulver/Brogan show.
Jeff and Chris have a natural reparte’ that makes the show run smoothly. Taking questions from the net and skype, it was fun to watch, and add audience comments.
Naturally, I had some ideas on raising the production values, but they did a great job with a few simple lights, a camera, and a microphone.
In a funny aside, I got an email from another member of the audience, confessing that he thought I was part of the video crew. Which is totally understandable; despite being an alleged “2.0 media disruptor” I still dress like a guy from IA Local 600.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Chris Brogan... // Apr 24, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Oh, you’re part of the crew. You just don’t know it yet.
Thanks for being there, for your thoughts and insights. It’s interesting what you brought to the table here in this post. I hope someone pushes through with some of these ideas.
2 Bill Cammack // Apr 24, 2007 at 3:46 pm
Yes, this technology is going to make a huge difference, because it’s a no-lose situation. Even if people don’t watch your show live, it’s archived, and they can watch it as if you had taped it and posted it.
It’s going to be even better when switching’s introduced, because that way, they can do remote feeds and throw to edited pieces and run graphics on the screen, including comments from the concurrent text chat.
3 Chris Yeh // Apr 24, 2007 at 10:18 pm
Love the show. Team Ustream is definitely planning to add things like switching feeds mid-broadcast. I just love how this medium is developing so rapidly.
–Chris Yeh (Ustream investor)
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