Geek Swagger.
TWiT goes live
These days it seems like the prospect of doing just straight audio content on the internet is old hat. Now everyone wants to do video. A year ago was just starting out, and Justin would stream his life 24/7, even when he slept. Since then it seemed that live streaming of content, no matter how boring, has gotten more and more popular. There are sites like and that have a ton of viewers and let people broadcast in a manner of minutes as long as you have a webcam. I know that I've gotten interested in a few people's streams - first at and then more recently some YouTube members' streams that are a little more low-key.
So with all that being said it's no surprise that Leo Laporte has decided to take the TWiT network live. The brilliantly named , for now, showcases Leo as he records his . If you've watched his stream before things look a lot different now, he's since moved out of the top floor of his office and is now downstairs in a nicely furnished room. He sits behind a large wooden desk with his microphone and does what he does best, record podcasts. Yesterday was his first day of recording, and as I'm writing this I'm listening to him record the podcasts with from Mad magazine. I'm a huge fan of having something going in the background that isn't necessarily music, and I don't really listen to the Giz Wiz podcast very often, so it's kind of nice to be able to pop in and see what Leo's doing while I'm getting something else done.
It goes without saying that I was a huge fan back when it existed, I know I've mentioned that many times on this here blog. If you were a fan too and you somehow haven't heard of TWiT I'd suggest giving TWiT Live a look. Leo has said a bunch of times on his many podcasts that he plans on fleshing it out a bit more, he said he'll start inviting some of the panelists from the various shows to his office so that they can do videos of the podcasts with the entire crew present. So far I haven't had the chance to catch that in particular but it should be cool once it happens. He's also said that he'll probably get some people to hook up a webcam so that, even if they aren't available physically, you'll still be able to see him on a large display he's got next to him. When the Tech TV show called moved to Canada they used to do this all the time, guests on the show would be on via webcam. It's really nothing new, but it should be interesting none the less!
All of this leads me to wonder where we'll go next. Because the technology is sort of limiting, the bulk of this online video streaming content has someone sitting behind their desk in front of their computer doing God knows what. Needless to say this can get a little boring after a while. TWiT Live is different because Leo's actually producing content while he's broadcasting, but that's not true for the bulk of broadcasters. That's where comes in. What Qik does is use video-capable cell phones to stream video just like a web cam, only they're obviously much much more portable. I've watched some of these videos too, mostly content from notables like and . When I was watching Kevin's stream he was broadcasting a that was pretty funny. As far as Veronica's Qik videos I've only seen one where she was folks about a cold that was apparently going around. The cool thing about all of this though is that Qik takes video broadcasting on the road. The only downside to Qik is that right now it only works with certain Nokia phones (, collect the whole set!) so it's not exactly open to anyone.
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| Print article | This entry was posted by dmkemick on May 1, 2008 at 4:00 am, and is filed under Internet. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
