« there is no boogeyman. | Main | harner meets sedaris. »
October 18, 2004
home broadcasting. for real this time.
Had a conversation with Jay this weekend about bittorrent and podcasting and video distribution. We're both in agreement that p2p works well for time shifted content, but it sucks for stuff you need to see live "event " coverage and interactive TV content. For those things, TV is still the best option.
So we just have to get people broadcasting from their homes to TV, then. No problem.
Here's an idea I just presented to Jay and Daniell:
[1] Set up a Mac with iChatAV, an AIM account, and a broadband connection. It sits there and waits for incoming video chat invitations. The audio and video go out of the computer to the switcher by way of either s-video out or VGA to a scan converter and miniplug audio out to RCA. We mirror the desktop. We connect a character generator to an analog to DV bridge that connects to the Mac. IChatAV will think it's a firewire camera. The character generator runs an animated loop to the TV screen that says:
"LIVE from Home, it's YOU on TV... Use your IM account to start a video chat to get on TV!"
[2] When someone invites the Mac to a video chat, you accept it, the CG gets squeezed to the corner and the person is on the air.
[3] As the person is on the air, change the CG to read:
"You're watching someuser@aol.com LIVE from Home. You on TV.... Live...."
The title emphasizes the fact that this is live video and that it's coming from someone's home.
[4] Give the person five minutes to do their show.... Next person.....
[5] For liability issues, you can limit it to people who have already signed producer agreements and give you their usernames ahead of time. Computers could also be set up for Yahoo Video IM or MSN video messenger to accept PC users.
Yeah, it's basically the WiFiTV and ITJ stuff we're already working on. The important part in this is the process stuff.
By the way, I have no idea who the guy in the image is. It's something I picked up while doing a Google image search for 'iChatAV'.
Posted by yatta at October 18, 2004 7:15 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.metadaddy.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/144