I had the chance to be part of a conversation where a debate about Live Casting or Live Video Bloging came up the other day. I have to say that although I enjoy the technology live broadcasts probably won’t catch on in any big way … at least not for some time.
Claton Morris (if you don’t know him is a host on foxnews and a tech guy) along with Gary Vaynerchuk The popular wine guy on Twitter held a livecast talking about how the new Twitter is Ustream.tv .
I think this might have a little to do with Claton just getting his new IPhone and Gary who loves to produce video blog about wine because its probably easier then typing in everything during a wine tasting.
Honestly Ustream is a great site and they provide a good service but does anyone remember webcam websites? Remember when webcams were really popular and you would go to a site that had live cams all around the world…. They got really popular during holidays like July 4th or New Years because people wanted to see what was happening live in other countries….
Well when was the last time you hit one of those sites? Probably pretty long ago and … you probably don’t do it that often..
The fact is LiveCasting may only cost the producer $50 for a Webcam but to feed those streams to more then about 50 people costs serious money. The most basic software that will let you live stream to your friends is Windows Media Encoder.
With encoder you can support maybe 5 people at a very reduced rate if you have a good quality internet connection Cable or FIOS.
If you want your viewers to see something better then 320×240 at 15fps then you will need to get yourself a server with a very heavy bandwidth plan.
I know a guy that does this. He teaches high end classes about animation to about 25 students at a time. The classes are live and he holds about 5 a day on different subjects. Now I will admit that he makes money at this even with the overhead but the reason he does is because of 2 things. He charges upward of $500 a class per student. He is also very good friends with the owner of his colo. This means he can get all the traffic he wants for very little cost.
Now how does this relate to the idea that Claton and Gary were putting out? The idea that video streaming can replace twitter or other social media sites?
Its the fact that the overhead can be very dramatic.
You are not simply talking about a couple ethernet cards and off you go but more the man hours and training needed to tune servers and support them if you want to LiveCast to more then a handful of people at any given time.
If you look at Google and YouTube the reason YouTube sold to google was that even with all their backing they could not support their project once it got going. They could neither fund it or expand it. Now that Google bought YouTube there have been many changes but still they strugle even to feed cached videos.
I simply can not imagine a time in the near future where any group of people will be able to LiveCast with any significant number of viewers.
Sure we will always have the LivePorn Cams GOT TO HAVE THAT! …
But to have 1 million or 10 million or 100 million people all at the same time… wanting to watch the ball drop over and over and over … That would defiantly be a self made catastrophe.
Some day someone will come up with a system that can handle that much data but it won’t be happening tomorrow or anytime soon.
That is my opinion on it …. I could be wrong and Leo Laporte is probably laughing at me while he has his thumb up his butt… But seriously ….
way Way WAY! too much overhead in my opinion.
I mean seriously … Amazon Clown Computing can barely keep 140 character messages alive… can you imagine what would happen if 60 million people wanted to watch and send live video all at once?
Whatever heh….
