It’s certainly not your late night public access channel, but that’s a good thing!
Recently I found a need to broadcast my webcam shenanigans to multiple friends. While YouTube offers a great venue for “previously recorded” materials that I can edit and post, I decided I wanted to perform live music (DJing, producing sessions, etc) and let people watch me while I do what I love. Since YouTube is going to be the last kid on the block to stream live video, I figured I would dig around to see what’s out there right now.
I’m going to cut straight to the chase: UStreamTV is by far one of the best websites out there to give anyone with a webcam the ability to broadcast to an audience. Within minutes I went through the painless registration, profile creation, channel creation, and had my webcam and soundcard pumping beats to my friends. They could watch every mundane activity I performed while mastering audio, or have fun watching/listening as I was mixing records or making new tracks.
One thing done oh-so-right by UStreamTV is the integration with social media. You can leverage the use of Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Live.com, Blogger– and they seem to add more services to integrate with every month. From the handy broadcasting interface you are able to ’share’ your updates from the show. I can Tweet that my show is starting, send Tweets during the show for announcements (in my case something similar to “I’m about to play a new Sliptide track in this DJ set, check it out (url to my show right here)”), or even send shout outs to my viewers!
Another feature I enjoyed was the ability to start polls within the integrated chat room attached to your UStreamTV channel. You can make a quick poll (I might make a ‘what song next?’ DJ poll, for example) that your viewers can respond to in real time.
There is also an option to record your broadcasts and have them stored on UStreamTV. You can save them as private clips or publish them as ‘favorites’ for your channel. Favorite clips can be played as pre-recorded material on your channel. This is a perfect opportunity to set up your channel offer a backlog of episodes or a ‘weekly’ run of shows; you don’t have to subject your audience to dead air whenever you are offline!
On top of that, add in a slick control GUI for audio source, audio level, video source and a video monitor to see how it looks to everyone– UStreamTV is the most complete web-based live broadcasting package I have encountered thus far.
I must also mention how fast UStreamTV is. The quality is solid and can be further tweaked for anyone that is willing to muck around with the Adobe Flash Video Encoder options that it supports. The standard quality is ‘good enough’ for most casual broadcasters. With that said there was only a few seconds (about 3 on average) of buffer to my viewers, though I don’t know how or if it scales with larger amounts of traffic on a single channel.
If you’re tired of waiting for YouTube to implement live broadcasting then check out UStreamTV. I don’t think you can find a better web based broadcasting suite out there, nor do I think YouTube will have the amount of options and prolific social media integration the first go around.
