by Nathan Stout
At work the Bariatrics Department wanted to start doing a ‘web conference’ so they wouldn’t have to spend money on sending employees to the different clinics for training. My coworker and I looked at different ways to transmit the video like utilizing various websites or built in services to some of the Windows servers we have. In the end we went with a website called UStream.tv a video streaming site.
Ustream is basically a YouTube for live broadcasts. What you can do with it is either just start broadcasting from your webcam or actually schedule an ‘event’ on the site where you let others know ‘hey, we will be on the air on this date and time’.
I think we will utilize the ‘scheduled event’ to broadcast our According To Whim shows. This will allows others to see that there is an upcoming show instead of hoping people will catch us randomly on the website.
It is basically a promotional tool for all the things we do. The audio shows we have been doing lately are mainly ‘goal’ based, where we talk about how well we are doing with certain projects. It isn’t really like the According To Whim audio shows we usually do. It won’t be AS interesting to everyone but it will be insightful. Maybe with it being live it will be a little more interesting (I am sure Chris will do his best to make it so).
I ran a test of the website from my home the other night and I ran into an issue. Apparently my ‘Jedi Cannon’ as Chris like to call it (my video camera) is ‘TOO GOOD’ to broadcast. By ‘too good’ I am saying the image is too large. I tried to use my photo camera but it doesn’t do the whole ‘web cam’ thing. I am going to take a webcam home from work to test it out with. I know it DOES work up here (at work) so the next issue I might have would be the speed of my Internet connection from my home. I am using the lower end DSL so there might be some clarity issues.
Other than that UStream looks to be a promising addition to all the different things we do here at According To Whim. The site allows you to save the video you broadcast so even if you miss the show, you can catch it later.