Live video and other cool stuff...

I get carried away sometimes with new tools and technology, anyone who knows me well knows this is true. I have a friend I used to work with at a summer camp who is in a band called iLyAimy, and she had put out a twit-book status update that you could watch her band play live by clicking on the link at a particular time. "Neat", was the first thought that came to mind as I began to recall my first experience with live Internet broadcasts. It was a Korn concert, and it was one of the first things of it's sort I would guess because their servers were slammed and it was hard to get in the Que if you lost your feed. The picture quality left a LOT to be desired and the audio was just as bad. After a while I gave up, it was too much of a fight to maintain a connection to a stream that was not so hot anyway. This was sort of what I expected when I saw the link sitting there in its glowing blue shiny-ness, waiting for me to click it. But boy was I wrong. The sound and the picture quality blew me away, especially since I was watching and listening to content being broadcast from hardware on a cell phone.

I have to hand it to www.uStream.tv, they have a really great service provided you have some half decent hardware, and I really mean it when I say say that it really only has to be half decent and not whole decent. For all of you out there with smart phones, GET THIS SERVICE!!! It's awesome and it will save you room on your micro-SD card as well as some hassle publishing your content. It streams audio and video from your phone (or your web cam enabled computer) live over their server, AND it archives it to their server for future viewing. You can also archive without broadcasting or broadcast without archiving. Once your content is archived you can then either download it to your computer as a .flv (other formats coming soon) or you can pipe it over to your YouTube account with a single click. How cool is that? They are also API'd all over the place, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, etc... including this blog. You can embed various parts of your account to other sites and services.

So I have added content from my uStream account to my layout here. Go to the bottom of this page to watch live video of the events I sponsor and more. There is also a chat box (uStream account required to participate) or you can tweet me live during my events. If you hear more than one audio source at a time, that is because I also have an MP3 player on the top of my layout. Just stop the MP3 player and enjoy the show. Now mind you I will be using a laptop with an external cam, broadband card and audio coming from a professional sound system, so the quality will be even better. I will probably start getting into the habit of dumping the MP3 player while I am doing live events soon so that you will not have to deal with stopping the MP3 player manually.

I was going to talk about other stuff in this post, but I got carried away with all this video stuff so I will get to other news in a later post. In the mean time, enjoy the live video whenever you manage to catch it.

Neely