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September 27, 2004
welcome to microcasting.
Adam Curry has a couple of posts today detailing Hugo Schotman's audio blogging setup. The best part about it: he uses iChatAV to send live audio to distribute audio via IM. (**whoa! there's the problem with reading blogs at 4am -- I delved deeper and realized that Hugo's using iChatAV to receive audio and not send it. Still a great idea, but different from microcasting. -kc.)
If you're a blogger with a tiny audience of, say, your family and friends, you can put your media on a loop and connect it to your computer in a way that it thinks it sees a webcam (for video) or microphone (for audio). You can create a bot that does nothing but listen for incoming videoblog or audioblog requests, and initiate a one-way video/audio chat with your viewer. All of a sudden you have streaming for an audience of one. No, it doesn't scale, but that's part of the point.
Maybe the answer to the bandwidth question isn't to throw more money at it but to go with what you have. Maybe there was a way to solve the distribution issue by throwing a clever hack at it. That was the basis of the microstreaming project I presented at the Tactical Media Toolkit workshop at Eyebeam this year:
Although extremely inelegant, I threw lots of hardware on the head end of iChatAV, transforming a DVD Player with RS-422 and an analog to DV bridge into something that would trick iChat into thinking it was a webcam. (Well, I guess anything firewire could work.)
After burning a couple of Jay Dedman's early videoblogs onto a DVD, I started learning to program bots, occasionally picking the brains of frumin and peretti for ideas. Eventually Jonah pointed me to Andy Baio's InfocomBot. About a month later, I came across Andy Ihnatko's iChat TV scripts in his "iChat With Your TV" article which provide a way to automate the one-way video chats. Since then, I've been working on-and-off on machine control (bad pun) via Applescript and thinking of ways to eliminate the DVD player and bridge setup. But also since then, I've come to remember that this was an exercise and not the end solution to the bigger problem of live distribution for video bloggers, so the project has kinda been archived for now.
If anyone can think of a reason to revive the vidchatbot, please let me know.
Posted by yatta at September 27, 2004 4:45 AM
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Hugo Schotman has a number of posts detailing his setup for audioblogging. In particular, check out how he uses audio chat software for doing interviews and remote reports and soundflower for passing audio from one app to another. His system seems to ... [Read More]
Tracked on September 27, 2004 12:31 PM
Comments
Nice idea! Can't wait for video conferencing with multiple parties (OSX Tiger). However, the point of my setup is not to broadcast to the iChat participant. The participant is a 'co-host' dialing in to the show. The show is being recorded locally to disc after which it is distributed. (Usually in the 'normal' podcasting way: RSS with enclosures.)
Posted by: Hugo Schotman at September 27, 2004 5:12 AM
When Tiger does come out with party-line video conferencing, this setup might be a great way to enable things resembling the house parties MoveOn was promoting for Outfoxed. Imagine being invited to a chat conference with a few friends to watch something "important" together. That could spread much more quickly than the house party model du jour.
Posted by: Josh at September 29, 2004 7:56 PM