Mobile Streaming

I really enjoyed what Nicholas of K had to say in the interview we did last night for Musicorama.tv. He spoke about projects and how we can achieve anything we want as long as our mind is in the right place. I’ll let you know when that interview is online. This year Paleo has been a different experience from previous years because I went as a “radio/TV” person as opposed to a collaborator (work for free, get free food and free non alcoholic drinks as well as invites for friends), in the latter case you sleep so little it’s not unusual to take a week to recover. I enjoyed myself. I enjoyed seeing all the live acts and I streamed quite a few events, from Iam, The Justice, The goose, Massive Attack and more. We also had interviews with BB Brunes, K, The DO, The Dodoz, Marvin, Girls in Hawai and Caribou if I remember all of them. Here are some of the Live streams Listen as the people realise what song it is. listen to the crowd roar :-) Tikan Jah Fakoly was good too. Nice relaxed evening. He was playing before Manu Chao Manu Chao played for over two hours but I had work the next day so I left early.

In the space of two weeks I have gone from having just 11,000 views on my youtube channel to over 16,000, thanks mostly to videos I shot with the phone. I went to film the Geneva Lake Parade and then the Paleo. The Lake Parade generated several thousand views and already I’ve had over four hundred views to the Paleo Manu Chao and Tiken Jah… can’t remember the name. It’s not bad and it demonstrates the trend that I think is interesting. Go out and film, put it online with the right keywords and watch as people flock to see the content that you have offered them. Of course this is just an experiment but it’s increased my visibility quite a bit. I’ll wait to see how long it takes to get to twenty thousand views and more. What are the next events I could cover in Switerland?

mousewords - Jul 4, 2008

:-D That *is* fun!

That’s fun :-) Thanks to the Geneva Lake Parade I saw a nice jump in traffic to the twelve videos or so I streamed and uploaded yesterday. I suppose when you cover the right event there is an audience. This is just one small example of why I should continue streaming video content. That’s also why I should get the content on a number of platforms.

Today both a friend and I are among the top qikkers of the day. Whilst Documentally of Ourmaninside.com was in Milton Keynes getting an iphone 3g and streaming a number of videos on the experience I was filming dancers at the Geneva lake Parade. Both these events have appeal for different reasons. We’re used to watching videos of Americans getting the iphone and doing a variety of geek events and for once we had the English experience. It’s not a very visual occurrence but at least it’s been streamed and shared. He also took the opportunity to speak about lifecast, a new way of sharing the media you generate over a day. The Lake Parade is a very different type of event. It’s the type of event photographers and camera oeprators go to in order to get video and photographs of girls dancing to music. It’s only once a year and previous years have been better. I like the fact that I can go to the event with a phone, stream video straight to the web and all without the hassle of a camera and laptop. I’m commenting on the latter because it’s the second time I see someone walking with a laptop in order to do some live streaming of an event whilst I’m very light. I could have shot in high definition but everyone’s doing that. What interests me is going to an event, finding some action, sharing it live as it happens and not have any real post production concerns. In general live streaming from mobile phones is an interesting way of covering events that does not get much publicity. As a result the audiences are not as large as they could be but that will change. It’s just a matter of getting people used to the idea of webcams and live streams being more interesting than a static twenty meters from where the action is happening.

Everyone’s always sitting in an office or at least in cities. I’m breaking away from that to stream the countryside. Remind people that it also exists.

It’s a sunday night in Switzerland and I’m with some friends. Spain were playing Germany and won 1-0, a respectable score. I was there with the phone streaming the celebrations at the Geneva Fanzone in Plainpalais. Here are the clips Ten seconds from the end. Spanish Fans celebrate. Drumming atmosphere. Happy girls dancing and the crowd. Dancing Spanish Flag wearing people. Because Women aren’t forgotten after all. Girls dancing, boy texting, more dancing More dancing Still celebrating Leaving the Fanzone

It’s a shame I was running low on battery last night because I was at the Fanzone in Geneva for the Italy Vs. France match. I managed to stream a few moments of the game. Since the Italians have won this game we can look forward to a lot of noise on Sunday if and when they win.  Perfect for me and live streaming.   The Penalty. Post match euphoria for the Italians, by then the French were already heading home.

And I may have taken over most of the frontpage by now.   

Two years ago we had the World cup and with that came hundreds of videos shot in cities around the world of people celebrating soccer (or football as a sport). At the time everyone would go out with their video camera, record the footage, wait till they got home, capture it and share via a number of sharing sites. The problem with this is that it’s both slow and tedious. It takes too much time and organisation to do. That’s where a new generation of mobile video streaming devices come in. Some applications like Qik and Bambuser are limited to people with cheap data rates via their mobile operators. As a result their services are not so interesting. What was missing from the market place were mobile video streaming services that would allow the content creator to backup the video to their mobile device before sharing it either over the air via 3g networks or wifi. Three services allow for this Kyte, which Scoble has talked about recenty, Flixwagon which I have talked about recently and then Livecast. Each of these video services allows you to save the video as you’re streaming. Kyte is interesting because it allows for you to share pictures, video, polls and audio from one application. Flixwagon is interesting because it allows you to compile all the metadata you want to have included with the video before you stream. It allows you to categorise it within set niches, then add keywords to make finding the video easier. Livecast is the most recent one I’ve tested (just a few minutes ago) and this one allows you to choose how much bandwidth you want to use, from just 24kb to 160kb. It gives you a stream limit of 2 gigabytes and storage of 100 megabytes… (if I remember right.) It differentiates itself with the stream from file option. You can record a number of videos on your phone and choose to send them at another time. It works well enough Video streaming is an easy way of sharing video with your friends without the need for a computer. As a result we should expect quite a bit more coverage of live events from the audience’s point of view, not just big budget broadcasters. This is a little rambling but it’s fun to see what’s available.