VCAM volunteer extraordinaire, Jeff Botas, has been experimenting with streaming some VCAM shows live on the Internet as well as offering them up for on-demand playback as podcasts and/or video blogs. So far, the experiments have been on Jason Piche’s Talking Trash, Brian Kling’s Street Signs and L.J. Palardy’s Global Sounds. Once we have a streamlined system in place for doing this regularly, we will offer training to producers who wish to do this for their own shows.
Jeff uses a combination of free web applications and Macintosh software to do the streaming and podcasting of the shows. For streaming shows live online, Jeff plugs the output of the record deck in the control room into his Mac laptop (we’re working on getting a machine in the control room for this specifically) and sends the live program up to a site called ustream.tv — a free web-based streaming and social networking site. As it’s uploaded, ustream sends the signal out live over the net. Anyone in the world with net access can watch the show, call the studio line (if the show is live on the air at the time) or even participate via an IRC chat session that the show’s host monitors during the broadcast.
For podcasting the video and audio of the completed show, Jeff is using blip.tv. Jeff writes…
This site rocks. There are a plethora of features that allow me to do everything I want and more with my video. Unlike YouTube, I can upload an entire show with no time or file size limits. No more splitting a half-hour show into 4 pieces with poor video quality. FTP is available so that I am easily able to upload one or multiple shows. The available distribution methods are phenomenal. I only use the RSS syndication for iTunes, the Facebook API, and Cross-posting, but there are many others (Internet Archive, del.icio.us, Twitter, MySpace, AOL Video, etc). The Facebook method puts a Blip.tv video player in your profile and automatically displays the most recently uploaded video. The Auto Cross-posting feature automatically makes a new post on your blog with embed code that shows your most recently uploaded video (ex: http://streetsignsvt.blogspot.com).
Thanks to Blip.tv, it’s easy to host and syndicate a video podcast while iTunes makes it easy to find for a large audience. Since I have Blip automatically creating the RSS feed for me, all I had to do was submit the feed URL to the iTunes podcast directory. Though the podcast has been available for several weeks, Jason and I finally found the time to do this for Talking Trash last night. I would have done it sooner, as I would for Street Signs, but I thought it best to have the show’s producer make the submission (using their Apple ID).
Here’s last Wednesday’s Talking Trash, which was streamed live over the web and then uploaded to blip.tv…
As Paula Routly mentioned at Friday’s Producers’ Recognition Dinner, we are entering an age of new media. The only question is, will we willingly embrace these new methods of online publishing and video distribution or will we fight, kicking and screaming, as we are dragged into this brave new world. We at VCAM are aiming for the former option. Thanks to people like Jeff and forward-thinking producers like Jason, Brian and L.J., the rest of us are able to learn by their examples.
November 19th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
Great work Jeff! Very impressive….
November 20th, 2007 at 3:49 am
Talking Trash can be seen live each Wednesday at 6:30 PM ET through the following URL: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/talking-trash
It may be useful for readers to know that ustream.tv has some competition. They were the first of their kind and are currently the biggest, but Stickam.com and Justin.tv are building similar video blogging communities. I don’t use either of them personally, but I know that they are working in the same space that ustream.tv is.
November 20th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
Hey there,
Really happy to see you guys like blip! Please let us know if there’s anything we can do to improve the service for you.
Yours,
Mike Hudack
Co-founder & CEO, blip.tv
November 20th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
In response, I sent the following message to info@blip.tv:
Hi Mike,
Thank you for taking the time to comment at VCAM’s blog. Now that you mention it, I do have some requests.
1. I would like the ability to have multiple Blip.tv video players in my Facebook profile. I upload multiple shows, each with it’s own Blip account, and would like to make each show’s feed/channel available in my profile. Maybe this is an issue for Facebook and not Blip, I don’t know.
2. I would like to see expanded administration features that allow me to assign roles to other Blip users. I’m thinking along the lines of how permissions were granted on BBSes (like Major BBS and Wildcat) 15 years ago or on modern day Internet forums (like within the Drupal CMS) today. It would be great to have Administrators with full permission to the dashboard, Editors with permission to write descriptions, Techs who are responsible for compressing and uploading video, etc. Maybe just having the ability for multiple users, all with the same permissions, to access an account/show without having to share their individual password would be enough. The shows for which I volunteer have multiple people working on them, each with their own area of expertise, each performing an individual role. It would help us to have this reality reflected on Blip.
3. In the dashboard, the list of distribution methods doesn’t appear to have any discernible order. Could we get this list alphabetized or grouped in some other way?
Again I thank you for reaching out to us and appreciate you soliciting feedback. I hope your Thanksgiving is a happy and healthy one.
Regards,
Jeff
November 20th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
Jeff,
Totally my pleasure to visit your blog!
Regarding #1, I think this is (probably) doable but I’m not quite sure how. Our Facebook application is still a very early version. We’re planning at some point relatively soon to revisit it and throw in a bunch of improvements from a better “click to play” graphic to the ability to embed the app in pages. When we get there we’ll see what we can do about embedding multiple players in a single profile or page. This is probably a month or more away, though, I’m afraid… we have a lot of other things we’ve got to work on between now and then.
Re #2, you’re talking about something that we know we need to offer but that’s definitely non-trivial. The first step for us will be separating “shows” from “accounts”. This will allow you to have more than one show under an account, and will also allow people to have accounts without having shows — even the first stages of a show. Once we do this we’ll be able to allow multiple accounts to have some form of administrative access to shows, too.
Unfortunately this is a pretty big engineering task given the current architecture of blip. Fortunately, though, it’s something we absolutely know we have to do.
It’s quite possible that we’ll end up doing this within the next two months. Once we’ve done it we’ll be able to do all sorts of fancy things… like having multiple accounts with different roles having permissions to a show.
Re #3, you make a really good point. We’ve known for a really long time that the Dashboard in general is in need of a pretty serious redesign. It’s grown really big and unwieldy over the past year as we’ve added new functionality without really rethinking the way users navigate it.
When we decouple accounts from shows we’re going to have to give the Dashboard a pretty serious makeover as a result. That’s when I’d expect to fix things like your complaint.
Make sense?
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!
Yours,
Mike
November 20th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
Mike,
If you’re reading this, it all makes sense. And just so you know, I don’t have any complaints. I’m a big fan of Blip. I was just making observations and hoping for the best.
Many thanks,
Jeff