Streaming Media - August/September 2008 - (Page 48)

GET A LIFE New Tools Put Lifecasting Within Anyone’s Reach By Ron S. Miller A bout 10 years ago, Jim Carrey was in a movie called The Truman Show, in which his character discovers that his whole life is a television show. This was 2 years before CBS’s Survivor put the idea of reality TV into the public consciousness (although MTV had been broadcasting The Real World since 1992) and years before the widespread proliferation of broadband. But The Truman Show was onto something well before its time: People could be interested in watching the mundane aspects of everyday life on TV (or on the internet). Fast-forward to 2008 and “lifecasting,” as it has come to be called, is very real. Cell phones and cheap video cameras have put the means to create and broadcast video instantly into the hands of ordinary people. When you compound that with new online tools that make it dead-simple to upload video or stream live from a cell phone, virtually anyone can broadcast their own lives or what they are seeing in the world around them. Whether this has any real commercial potential beyond novelty and narcissism is still very much open to question, but there is little doubt that The Truman Show’s screenwriter, Andrew Niccol, was a visionary. What Is Lifecasting? Lifecasting is really about consumers sharing their lives instantly, explains Sarig Reichert, co-founder and VP of marketing at Flixwagon, a site and service that enables individuals to broadcast video from a cell phone in real time. Flixwagon’s tag line is “Your life … live.” Andrew Hyde, marketing director at Rawflow, Ltd., a company that runs a site called Selfcast, describes it in more general terms. “Life or self-casting is ultimately different things to different people. Some people will want to broadcast; some will want to watch. For some it’s a creative medium, a political medium, or an educational one. Selfcast.com is simply a broadcasting platform that enables all these things,” he says. Rawflow president and co-founder Mikkel Dissing adds, “The company started back in 2000 when I began developing live streaming technologies with a business partner. The idea for Selfcast was always in our minds; we saw the technologies we were developing as being socially liberating—now everyone could have their own TV station broadcast online.” But Steve Rosenbaum, CEO at Magnify.net, a site that allows users to upload video to their own “channel,” says it’s important to understand that there is a commercial side to this as well, and some people are hoping to make money from this type of broadcasting. “There is a pretty bright line between diary lifecasting and people trying to build a business,” Rosenbaum says. The way he differentiates this is by describing someone who goes to a bar every Thursday to sing karaoke. This person, he says, isn’t likely to think of himself or herself as a musician. But a person who plays guitar and sings every Thursday night, puts out a tip jar, and hopes to get a recording contract has a totally different mind-set. “Most of the people on Magnify.net are building businesses, not hobbies,” he says. Who Is Doing This? When you look at sites offering these types of services, the types of content are as varied and unusual as you would find on YouTube or MySpace, or any blog for that matter. And as Rosenbaum points out, there 48 STREAMING MEDIA August/September 2008 http://www.Selfcast.com http://Magnify.net

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Streaming Media - August/September 2008

Streaming Media - August/September 2008 Table of Contents No Doubt - Editor's Note Mo’ Videos, Mo’ Money: Solving the Problem of Network Cost Why Good Design Matters More Than Ever: Just. Press. Play. Technology and Business Trends by the Numbers High-Touch Encoding With Microsoft Expression Encoder 2 The State of the Content Delivery Market, 2008 Get a Life: New Tools Put Lifecasting Within Anyone’s Reach So Many Codecs, So Little Time: Comparing H.264 Files Using Codecs From Apple, Dicas, and MainConcept Writing an RFP for Maximum ROI: Things to Consider and Questions to Ask When Writing a Request for Proposal for a Corporate Webcasting System The Patent Wars Producing Screencams in Camtasia Studio Analyze That Using Video to Communicate Change for Business Success Intellectuals’ Property Rights

Streaming Media - August/September 2008

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