Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Camera to audience, almost immediately


The Sacramento Bee is using small video cameras equipped with cellphone connections to stream video from Olympic torch protests in San Francisco to its website in near-real time. The shot above was about two hours old when I captured it.

They're taking advantage of Qik, a service that streams video live from your cell, to stage the material, then transferring it to sacbee.com. Here's a basic explanation as reported to me:

The video is shot with a small camera that has cell-phone components and streamed back live to this web site (http://qik.com/browse/videos?sort=ratings&tag=The+Sacramento+Bee). Like a YouTube video, the display can be embedded into an other web page.

I don't think the videos are streamed live on Sacbee, but the recordings are posted very fast for near-live viewing.

Fresno has also pioneered the Qik live video connections. Anybody else?

3 comments:

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    ReplyDelete
  2. Woobie, we were embedding the Qik links into our stories as they happened ("Live and direct...") and then later dropping the Qik FLVs into our vMix site. Well, when we were fast enough anyway :).

    I'll have to ask Manny (the photographer who shot the Qik video above) if he did it this time, but he was talking about mounting the mobile phone on top of his video camera so he could stream live AND take higher quality HD video for later editing.

    By the way, the whole idea for using Qik came from conversations with Fresno Online AME (ToastedWoobie) and later "cubicle meetings" with our Multimedia folks ("Guys, check THIS out...").

    Fresno didn't "also" pioneer this, they lead it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous7:20 PM

    This is awesome stuff and the videos were uploaded to Vmix but we just need to tweak them to fit the player better. Raleigh is watching!
    Barryj

    ReplyDelete

 
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