The Age of LIVE Internet TV
Justine Ezarik has gone live. As of a few days ago, Pittsburgh’s own personal brand unto herself has leapt into the “life recorded all the time” arena. I dropped by her site, iJustine.tv, last night to say hi. And despite being somewhat annoyed by all the pervs in her chat room asking her to get naked, I was happy that she caught my Twitter, waved hi, and went back on with her life. (BTW- I *was* going to write about how Justin Kan never got all those pervs in HIS chat room, but then I remembered when he went on that date, and oh yes he did.
Justin and I hung out at ONHollywood for a while, and despite desperately wanting to podcast our conversation, I kept it “real.” I asked Justin what were some of the challenges to recording one’s life live. I told him that the very first moment I tuned in was when he was navigating going to the bathroom without showing off his business to everyone. Justin laughed and said he gets that a lot- people revealing less-than-ideal jumping on points. But for us, Justin Kan has taken on the real live version of The Truman Show or EDtv. He’s one of the live pioneers.
No Strangers to Live
Here’s my boss, Jeff Pulver, and his friend Geo, broadcasting live from the car. Well, it’s a recording of when they ran a live broadcast while driving along. LIVE! From a moving car! How cool is that? (And scary.)
Jeff and I do a show sometimes on uStream.tv. We do it in a studio, with lots of interesting folks in the chat room audience (a staple of the new live experience). There’s always someone there, usually dragged in from Twitter and Jeff’s blog.
Chris Pirillo does a live show as well. I just peeked in while writing this post. It’s 3:40AM west coast time, and 55 people from all over are in there hanging out. Doing what? Watching Chris type, near as I can tell. He’s not facing the camera. He wasn’t at that moment engaging the people. Just typing. 55 people.
YOU Go Live
The two services out there to beat are uStream and BlogTV. Ustream is cleaner-designed, and seems to eat fewer resources. It has embed codes to throw your archives or your live show right up on your blog. BlogTV is missing a few features, but its killer app right now is having a cohost, a second video feed live at the same time as the primary. Oh, and you can load and unload cohosts all over the place. It’s great.
I’ve spoken to lots of people trying out the creation of LIVE Internet TV. On the one hand, this is different than webcams of the 90s. You can archive. You can share. It’s not just naked people (though I’ve seen that on places like Stickam and other services - not because of anything Stickam does, by the way- hell, they’ve got all kinds of things saying don’t you dare get naked). *Just because I don’t want lawyers to sue me: I’m not saying Stickam promotes this. I’m saying they dissuade it. Really. Note to pervs: go there, and leave Justine alone.
But Why and What Next?
It’s really exciting doing live Internet TV. I did interviews yesterday with Eric Skiff of Clipmarks, Jim Long of Verge New Media (day job: NBC cameraman), Goldie Katsu, security professional and Jewish mysticism expert, Ed Kohler, half of Technology Evangelist, and both Steve and Carol Garfield from the Carol and Steve Show. I love the back and forth. I enjoy watching how questions from the live chat room shape things.
But what next? I loved watching Robert Scoble drag his live feed around a break table at the Web 2.0 Expo a few months back. It got me connected to people at an event that I didn’t attend. I know that Reverend Jon Swanson has experimented with broadcasting live church sermons to people who can’t make it in to church. I’ve watched Matthew Ebel take it to a live gig in Pittsburgh. Where does it go next?
Is pre-recorded video podcasting dead? I don’t think so. My wife, Katrina, said yesterday at the live event, “Editing is good manners.” She meant that producers of content must respect the time of their audience, and that creating something meaningful means also creating something that’s not full of air, fluff, ums, and dead spots. Doing live TV, especially with less-than-perfect preparation, means a lot of dead space and air-filler.
Your Take
I’m a fan of the LIVE stuff. Were I to bother putting out rich media right now to convey a personal message, I’m sure that I’d use either the Ustream or BlogTV platform to do the work. I’d shoot it live, and then take the archive for a rebroadcast.
What about you? Where do you see this going? What’s your interest level for live versus recorded? Will YOU be streaming any part of your life LIVE any time soon?
photo credit laughing squid
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Comments
I always find it funny when the TV News crews are dispatched out to stand in front of a business or school, after hours, when it is closed, just so they can report “live” from the scene to talk about a related story.
Maybe a green-screen in the studio would be cheaper?
Great post Chris. I’ve used both blogtv and ustream and agree with your take on the services. I broadcasted live on both services which is something I thought I would hate doing since I’m really not one to like having the spotlight on me. But something weird happened while broadcasting live, I actually enjoyed myself.
All I was doing was sitting in front of my computer, browsing the web, either watching t.v. or listening to music and talking about the different sites I was visiting and what I was listening to. People joined the room and a chat took place while I was live. It felt like having my own talk radio show! I was chatting with people from different parts of the US, the UK and one person from Brazil.
It is exciting broadcasting live and also fun to be unscripted and responding to peoples comments in the chat. I don’t think live broadcasting will hurt taped broadcasts though I think it adds a new dimension with having live chat going on at the same time giving the broadcast more of a talk show feeling.
I hope to see you broadcasting one of these days. I follow you on twitter so I’m sure I will soon.
I like connecting with people live - it’s fun. But more than that, I think it could be a great way to actually sell things. It’s great advertising.
I was just chatting with Phil Campbell (http://r3wind.com/) on BlogTV, and we were talking about making money (among other things).
It’s pretty hard to charge for video downloads - and advertising seems to be the only way to make money from online recorded video. But Live web tv makes it possible to differentiate between Live and Edited. You might be able to say, “Watch this Live show for free - then buy my edited HD video.”
John Leeke of http://HistoricHomeworks.com has been doing this kind of thing for a while - advertising his services using Live broadcasts. He fixes up historic homes. He does a live broadcast showing off various How To techniques and engaging with viewers. I can’t remember how many viewers he gets Live, but quite a lot. Then thousands more access the recording of his session over the next few days and weeks.
But of course, people want more - so once they’ve seem him do his stuff and they’ve connected with him live, they are inspired to pay for his services, and for further instructional materials.
Surely it’s possible to use what your wife said to our advantage - people want Editing… so I can see a skilled person giving free Live shows at relatively low resolution featuring rough & ready tutorials with dead air and viewer interaction… and then I can see some of those viewers being prepared to pay for more specific, edited, high quality tutorials in the form of edited HD download or DVD tutorials, books or even PDFs.
Maybe.
This is the stuff the internet was made for: the continuous, immediate flow of communication between people. We have just been practicing up to now.
I have been reinvigorated by the development of these live services. In the past, this type of service has been incredibly expensive and difficult.
Chris, you neglected to mention Operator11.com, which combines the ability of a live show with chat, and the incorporation of multiple cameras, which could as easily be different views of the same ’set’, or different people in front of their own ‘feed’. Operator11 also enables a ‘bucket’ of pre-recorded .flv video files, which by default are PSAs, but could as easily be, oh, i don’t know, a videoblog entry or a, hmmm, commercial? These can be ‘cut to’ within the stream. The caveat with O11 is the 40 min time constraint. This has a benefit, however, in that it forces the show host to ‘tighten it up’ and ‘keep it moving’.
I have been webcasting the live music performance from my coffee shop at http://www.cafn8ed.com/Live for the past month. The performers are very excited by the prospect, have entertained folks from all over the world, and they can take requests from the chatroom!
You are certainly correct that the chat room aspect of these live broadcasts are integral and, I say, empowering to the viewer.
Another guy who is getting it right, IMHO, is Tom Green. He’s taken a tired and safe format, the celebrity interview talk show, and beaten the fourth wall into submission. Tom incorporates his viewers as live feeds during the broadcast, and lets them interact directly with the guests. His recent guests have been overwhelmingly positive about the experience.
As for the live-on-scene, or live-in-public potential, I look forward to the day all our camcorders have an embedded EVDO or WIFI antenna, and can link back to an O11 feed while some net-director can cut between feeds in real time, and hand off the chair to another director from somewhere else. That’d be tha shizza.
‘Course, it could just be the coffee talkin’. ;)
Great post Chris. I agree with everything you said. As others have said above it’s the appeal of instantaneous communication and interaction with people from all over the world. Sure alot of people don’t get any enjoyment from watching people sit and surf the net but others do. No longer are we limited to physical neighbors across the fence but digital neighbors across the ocean. And that’s really cool.
Great post, Chris. Interacting live with people who share common interests is powerful stuff. Video brings people much closer than any other form of media available today.
I think user generated content should stay off video in most cases.
The only live stuff I watch is sports (and even then it doesn’t bother me too much to watch clips later on). I like watching videos from the web but non of them are ever live.
Other than that I don’t find these live broadcasts of people’s life all that interesting. I think the only things that matter to me that have to be live are cool events (like sports) that I just can’t attend personally. On the other hand, I couldn’t stand watching all the big brother or “the real life” type shows so maybe I’m not a good example.