Mogulus and Ustream.tv: I Am A TV Station

It’s actually kind of paradoxical that I am experimenting with technologies that will allow me to broadcast shows on the web, since I hardly watch television. The the exploding culture of web video is a different beast, and I love the immediacy of video interviews. So, starting a few weeks ago I began fooling around with various applications to learn what is possible.

After some preliminary sniffing around, I stumbled on Mogulus, which bills itself as a platform for 24hr web video channels. And, at first, it seemed to offer a collection of features geared to exactly that. But after some initial promise, the shortcomings of the service have led me to consider other alternatives.

Setting up a Mogulus ‘station’ is simple. You provide a name, and you can be livestreaming from a webcam in minutes. You can upload prerecorded videos, and mix live an prerecorded clips. Here’s a screenshot where I have created an overlay dropped on a prerecorded clip.

Mogulus Studio, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Shows can be recorded, and stored. And you can queue up a battery of recorded media to play when you are not broadcasting live.

So what’s not to like? First, I have had problems uploading larger media files, like 10 minute interviews from my cell phone’s video. To get around the erratic uploading problems, I had to downsample video on my Mac, and then upload. Secondly, I have had very variable streaming from the site: it appears that at peak times Mogulus is allocating it’s bandwidth to larger customers, or maybe everyone is getting bad throughput. At any rate, choppy video is no fun to watch, so this is sort of kills the utility of the service. A third gripe is that there is no way to store audio, or to mix audio on top of video, so even if you plan to do a live show, if you plan to use any music at all, you have to mix it on your PC: either mixed into a prerecorded video, as I did for the /Aviso show’s intro and outro, or live, using some mixer capability, like SoundFlower.

In my first attempt to have a live show, I ran into other snags. My pal, Nandor, from FW Studios, was trying to use his PC as the staging machine for the show, but we were unable to get the audio from the Canon video camera we were using to be audible through Mogulus. This could be an unrelated problem, however, since audio and video run through PCs and Macs as different channels, and have to be managed differently. And when we tried to connect that camera to my Mac, I saw neither video nor audio. However, I have successfully used an internal iSight, an external iSight, and my cell phone video (via Movino, see Movino: S60 Nokia Phones Can Be Used As WebCam On Mac OS X) with Mogulus, so I bet it was our setup, not Mogulus. We recorded the show, and uploaded the bits to Mogulus, where I ran it as a series of prerecorded parts, and recorded the whole thing. It is now running on a loop on the channel there: www.mogulus.com/aviso.

I heard that the streaming at Ustream.tv is more reliable, so I decided to take a look at that. Some of the features are similar, especially with regard to running a live show, but Ustream.tv is much more bare bones that Mogulus with regard to neat options like overlays, ticker tapes, and the like. Here’s a screenshot of me livestreaming through my iSight:

/Aviso, Ustream.TV: . Technology,Podcast, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Ustream.tv seems designed for live streaming, and if you want to do much more than that you will have to investigate desktop options to double as the ‘studio’.

Various folks recommended that I download the very cool CamTwist which I have done. This is a virtual switchbox, allowing you to easily switch between different video sources, and apply some interesting effects too, like thought balloons, blur, and many many others. I doubt I will use any of the effects, candidly, but I do want to be able to show my desktop to talk about various applications, and I might run a slideshow. But CamTwist is a lifesaver in that I can run recorded video clips from my desktop which can be streamed to Ustream.tv.

This poses a few problems, since Camtwist is just streaming the video channel, not the audio. This is solved by the use of SoundFlower, another free download, which allows Mac users to grab the audio output from anything running on the Mac and direct it wherever. The download includes both the driver and the SoundFlowerbed app which allows the aspiring audio engineer to fool with the audio controls. For my purposes, I simply used the built-in Camtwist option to direct the audio output of a prerecorded movie being played by Camtwist to Soundflower, and then in the Ustream.tv console I selected Soundflower as the audio input, as shown here:

Ustream.Tv Broadcast Console, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

So, now I can stream prerecorded video and audio directly from my desktop, and then switch to live streaming video and whatever audio device I am using, which in my case is generally my Snowflake USB mic, but could be something else, like the audio from a camera, or the audio and video from my cell phone via Movino.

I am going to recompose the first show and rerecord it on Ustream.tv this week as a dry run, as well as posting a bunch of interviews from Techcrunch50. I plan on doing something at Blogworld next week, but I may wait till I get back to San Francisco to do the live show from my office.