I had an interesting experience this weekend. Not being able to join in and try/buy a iPhone I decided to tune into some of the live streaming video of the lines outside the apple stores. Apart from seeing Bill Atkinson's home made iPhone made from maple wood, and waiting for him to cry out "Marty you have to reach 88mph" (he kinda looks like doc Brown from back to the future) it was interesting.

I watched Zooomr's coverage on Ustream.tv which used a java client. It was pretty nasty, burping still frames and dropping connections all over the place. I am sure they learn't some good lesson's and will be improving their service. But it was a great way to get some media coverage that wasnt of some half naked fat guy that is a profession queue camper.

Techcrunch covered the idea that it might be the seed of a revolution HERE. Its nothing new but maybe the world is ready for it. I remember my first Job out of Uni (well in the profession I studied), was at New Zealands main broadcasters Online wing. We made live shows specifically for the web and streamed live events. I learnt alot!

What alot of people are missing is the basic things that even startup TV stations have to do:

• Good lighting
• Good sound
• Good picture
• Good service
• GOOD CONTENT

Master those and your well on your way to smashing Justin.tv. The problem I guess comes from the lack of hardware suited to the task. We used to nick off with a news van from the "real tv" people (no more than a mini van), strap 2 office desks in and strap in all the monitors, mixers, encoders etc, then cable tie a wireless antena to the roof racks. Then run out long cables to decent DV camera's and go nuts (this was waaaaay back in 2000).

Through this setup we covered fashion shows, rugby events, strange competitions, and real news. We even had interactive links in the video (ahhh windows media 2000 oh how I hate thee) 

Being a film student I filmed and edited the stuff and published it online. But the most depressing thing was that the previews of the local soaps always got higher rankings than this custom made content. Maybe the world is ready to watch live events from a non bias, non conglomerate, media sources.

If anyone is planning one of these things feel free to ping me as I have learnt a lot through the mistakes we made, and would love to see this sort of stuff start to take off again. Props to Zooomr for taking the initiative and doing what they did, I also understand the guys at gizmodo did the same thing. </2centsworth>