Live video feeds on the Internet are becoming main stream, first from the media providers, but increasingly from small, creative content creators using services, such as UStream.tv and Stickam.com. There’s Justin.tv, chris.pirillo.com/live, SeeMeWin.com, and others. We’ve done some live video casting at CES and more recently at Mix07 using both services. It was a lot of fun–even with all the technical problems and pressure to stay online as much as possible.
Currently the tools are so-so. I use WebcamMax which isn’t too bad, although it’s more of a virtual camera tool than what I really need–a single location to cue and control multiple cameras and effects. Mogulus is getting the closest to providing a video console like I want though it’s biased to creating content for their broadcasting channel. I want something I can use wherever I need it, whether that’s Mogulus, UStream, YouTube, or simply a video I’d like to store online.
Of course, there’s similar video content (although not live) being created by many video bloggers and content creators, such as Robert Scoble. Many of them use a variety of video editing and encoding tools to produce their content–to great effect.
However, everyone has been running into an issue that I think is solvable with a bit of technology. Here’s the problem: For us tech-oriented people we often want to capture or record what’s being displayed on the screen of a computer. When we own and control the computer ourselves we can use Camtasia, WebcamMax, or similar products to “record” or copy portions of the display and even integrate the “screencast” into other video content that’s either been recorded or even live. The screen capturing these programs provides is nice because it gets around having the problem of having to struggle to find just the right angle to shoot the screen using a typical video camera. Glare can be a problem, but so can be the problem of getting close enough to see anything meaningful.
Anyway, this is all fine–unless you don’t have control of the machine you want to record. What I’d like to see is a new standard emerge–one where computers are able to digitally broadcast portions of there screens to anyone that would like to record it–whether it’s a classroom of students or people walking past a kiosk or attendees checking out the latest product at an expo.
Ideally a screen-capturing capability like Camtasia could be built into the OS or at least provided along with the OS. I’ve blogged about this before. But that’s only a piece of the puzzle. What would really be cool is if you could make your live screencasts public–kind of like making a folder or file public on a system. Then when someone walks up with their notebook or Tablet PC, they can see the live feed within OneNote lets say and take a snapshot or short recording. Or imagine someone recording a person demoing an app with a digital camera and then when they step in range an option is displayed that enables a crossfade to a screencast directly from the computer.
Unfortunately, there are several things that would need to be developed to pull this off. There is one possible solution that gets pretty close to working today. It’s a bit inefficient, but here goes. The idea would be to run a screen capturing utility that provides a virtual webcam feed which can then be made public via UStream.tv, let’s say. Then what’s needed is a way to take the download video stream from UStream.tv and convert it into a webcam driver format on the fly. Why as a webcam? So that the video stream can be embedded into a variety of apps and devices that support it. It’s a “common” format. Of course, with an open API apps could just as easily grab the video stream from the Internet and process it directly, but the FLV (or Silverlight) -to-webcam converter has the advantage of being more universal.
With the video feed people can use the content as they would any other video stream. They could display the content full frame, picture-in-picture, cropped, or whatever. They could record it, grab a single frame, or use the “video” live.
I’ve been looking around to see if anyone has created a webcam driver like this for Windows, but I haven’t found anything yet. I see there are some open source projects that might be worth studying to figure out how FLV processing might work, but I’m guessing that when you’re talking real-time that what’s out there probably isn’t sufficient. That’s just a guess.
I also am curious if Silverlight has more to offer here. Is there an open format here for its video stream? More to learn.