I want to take you back all the way to 2007, this is when the first sites started to come up which allowed anyone with a computer, webcam and a microphone the ability to have their very own TV show if you like. Back in them days, of course, we had no adverts and there was many people jumping on the bandwagon to start their very own show. If we look towards the tech shows of the time, two people were ahead of the game; this being Chris Pirillo & Leo Laporte. These people were no strangers to TV, they used to be on the USA show TechTV and many people strived to be like them, the same sort of show, the same graphics and even the same format. I wish to chart the rise and the fall of Tech Shows in general and look towards the future.

Ustream versus Justin

Back then, UStream was the king with the upstart Justin.TV seen as a childish attempt at a streaming host. Ustream had its good and bad features, the main thing that comes to mind was the ability to record segments and have a loop playing when you were off-air. This was also the bad side of course as you might have forgot to start recording and people will miss the action later on.

Justin.TV on the other hand records all shows and keeps them for 7 days, you can highlight what you need to keep and download them to your computer (if you are the host). The problem came when these hosts needed to make money and this is where adverts started to come into play. If you look at Ustream now, it plays an advert as soon as you jump on the stream, it lasts for 30 seconds (at least), and plays adverts every so often as well as all over the page.

People started to notice how Ustream were happier hosting the stars (who paid the money of course) over the ‘normal’ people who helped get Ustream noticed and soon many jumped ship to Justin.TV who had less adverts.

From ad-hoc to structured shows

The ways the shows worked in the earlier days were quite simple, the person switched the camera on when they were not so busy and had Skype callers keep the show going, jumping from topic to topic. The microphones were not as good, the cameras not HD and there was no lower thirds with shot switching but the fact is – people came none the less. The raw reality is that no amount of flashy graphics is going to paste over the fact that a show is lacking in any sort of content and have ‘no soul’ if you like.

The first thing that came with many of the shows was simply a time slot – this makes sense as TV works like that. As the majority of shows are USA based, this means the European audience most of the time will miss out. Why not watch the show via Recorded content or another means (YouTube, iTunes subscription etc.) – this is possible but you miss the interaction that the show brings.

The next thing that started to crop up I noticed was “Pre-recorded” and by this I mean the hosts would stream the last few shows they had recorded to HD on a loop, which meant the show always looked like it was live but in fact it was an old show. Twit does this but they have so many shows running through the day that there is a good chance you have not seen them anyhow.

The rise and the fall

 It starts with a mixer, add in a microphone, a better camera, more cameras, better microphone, better stands, compressors, higher bandwidth, tables for guests and the list goes on and on. Were these people making money from this? They got some trinkets for their trouble but is it worth it? Would you go to work for 8 hours a day and be happy to get a couple of hard drives for your trouble?

The constant streaming soon started to take its toll on real life stuff such as jobs, family and friends. First came the ‘break’ – what this meant in real terms was they were sick of doing live shows but did not want to see all their hard work go to waste, this gave them a means to come back online at a later date. Many shows just dropped, never seen again with most people heading to make YouTube Video’s instead.

One show I wish not to mention had a break, came back, hand another break and when they did come back, they were always late and by this I mean not 30 minutes late but like hours late. They probably wondered why they had no audience left but the reality of that was if a person thinks the show is dead, they are not going to keep coming back ‘just in case’.

Who is still around?

Looking through the sites out there, there is maybe a handful of shows left doing tech, the majority stream late USA time, so for the purpose of this post, I shall discount them. There is a few UK based Tech shows but these follow the format that is old and tired and by this I mean they have a ‘panel’ of guests who discuss the news (I already know the news thanks), discuss something they read online and normally only do one hour long show.

The stark reality is I can get more entertainment and discussion from a Google Hangout then I can any show left running these days. I did some random testing of streaming as it goes and for this experiment, I streamed Movies + TV Shows on one account. I never tweeted it out, I never told anybody yet many came. I streamed The Tech Buzz old Youtube Videos and the reason for this was so it looked like a tech show (if you see what I mean) if you were cruising around looking for a show and it’s not like there is page after page of tech shows on Justin. I had nobody turn up and this was to be expected.

The Future

Does this mean this is the end for Tech Shows, as we know them? When there is people doing something, more people want to join in and the momentum grows, the opposite is also true. If you think the tech side is dead, then why would anyone waste time making one? Chicken & egg we think.

Two ways to look at this – if a person wanted to make a stream so they can get money and goodies instead of a real job then I can see this failing as they will be driven by the sponsors (if they got any). If a Person just wanted to do an ad-hoc show with no rigid format, have fun and do some proper tech instead of just talking about it – then I can see this growing bigger over time. The only hurdle in the way is making time to do a show and having something to talk about on said show. I do not think they need a panel and if they do, Google Hangout is good enough I feel.

Thoughts

What about your thoughts? Do you see it getting better or has it been and gone as they say. What do people gain from running a show, is it the same as somebody running a free MMORPG for example?

Recently I tested streaming a movie to Justin.TV via wirecast and this worked very well indeed, the quality was as good as watching it local and it played without breaking up, lagging or anything like that. There is a few issues with using Wirecast though, the first is the fact it can only play certain file types (mostly MP4) and second, you have to babysit the process to swap movies. After some searching, I came across JTVLC - this can stream content from VLC which in turn can use a playlist.

Setting up VLC

The first task is rather simple, you open VLC, goto View on the menu and select Playlist. Another Window will open up with a blank playlist. It is now a simple case of dragging and dropping the required movie’s to form a playlist. Now back on the main VLC Window – Media, Save Playlist to a File. At this stage (on Windows) maybe make a folder called JTV to store all the files. You can now close VLC.

JTVLC

If you head off to the main JTVLC web page, there is download for Linux, Windows and OSX. Save the zip file and expand the contents into the JTV folder from earlier. We need to get the streaming key for this to work, so head off to justin.tv, click GO LIVE and now half way down is more streaming options click on other on the top left.

The Section under Flash Media Encoder has Config file, save this for now and we can open it to find the right streaming key. Edit the jtv.500k.4.3.xml file (with say notepad) in somewhere in there you should see <Stream>live_xxxx</stream), the part between the words <stream> is your streaming key, do not share this at any cost with the general public.

You now need to make a BAT file (Windows) which will start jtvlc, inside this you need to write:

@echo off
“C:\JustinTV\jtvlc\jtvlc.exe” username streamkey C:\jtv\vlc.sdp

The user name of course is the name of your channel and the stream key as we discussed earlier.

BAT file to start VLC

This is by far the best way to do it in that it works for the most part at least. Create a BAT file and put one of the following lines in:

rem this works if your video files are of different sizes
“C:\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe” –extraintf http “C:\JustinTV\Playlist.xspf” –sout-keep –loop –sout=”#gather:transcode{venc=x264{keyint=24,idrint=2,cabac=0,bframes=0},vcodec=h264,vb=800,acodec=mp3,ab=128,channels=2,samplerate=48000,audio-sync,deinterlace{deinterlace=linear},threads=2,sfilter=’marq{marquee=$N,color=11319054,position=9,size=16}:marq{marquee=$L/$D,color=11319054,position=10,size=16}’,vfilter=canvas{width=640,height=360,aspect=16:9}}:duplicate{dst=rtp{dst=127.0.0.1,port=1234,sdp=file:///C:/jtv/vlc.sdp}}

or

rem this works if all your video files are identical in size but requires MP4a Audio
“C:\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe” –extraintf http “C:\JustinTV\Playlist.xspf” –sout-keep –loop –sout=”#gather:transcode{venc=x264{keyint=128,idrint=2,cabac=0,bframes=0},vcodec=h264,vb=800,acodec=mp4a,ab=128,channels=2,samplerate=48000,audio-sync,deinterlace{deinterlace=linear},threads=2,sfilter=’marq{marquee=$N,color=11319054,position=9,size=16}:marq{marquee=$L/$D,color=11319054,position=10,size=16}’,vfilter=canvas{width=640,height=360,aspect=16:9}}:duplicate{dst=rtp{dst=127.0.0.1,port=1234,mux=ts,sdp=file:///C:/jtv/vlc.sdp}}

I used the top one myself and it seemed to work.

What is it doing?

The process works like this, VLC Streams the movie to a file on your drive, jtvlc takes that content and streams it to JustinTV. You can open up the SADP file in VLC and yoou can see what it looks like before streaming. A few key facts about the BAT file above though, the size (width=640,height=360,aspect=16:9) and the bitrate (vb=800) are the key to quality.

Problems Encountered

I have tested this across various machines, the end result varies from No Audio, blockly video, lagging and so forth. The number one issue though was when it jumps to the next movie, all that is shown on Justin.TV is a black screen. If you restart JTVLC batch file – it streams again, so this to me is not a fully workable solution.

If anyone has managed to conquer this – feel free to message me in one shape or fashion or just leave a comment below.

I have seen my fair share of shows on the streaming side of life but when I came across a show going by the name of the Mentalist, this is when you have to wonder what it is all about. This person is from Ireland and his name is Tom Williams, his blurb claims he is also a psychic medium and one of his party tricks is to give you a ‘reading’ – he does private video sessions (£60 per day) – go figure. Let me tell you about the one night that I happen to catch him live on air.

First I get Banned

If you come in and give any sort of bad karma, he will get rid of you, the claim here is that he does not want ‘negative’ energy in the room. The reality is he only wants people who are gullible to take in what he is preaching about – makes sense right.

In comes the first taker

A Person enters the room and asks for a reading, at this point Tom starts waving his hand over his keyboard while his eyes are closed, to simulate feeling the energy I guess. He finally says he is in contacts with the spirits and says the word Goat. He keeps going over and over about the word goat, maybe it is a toy, a real goat, something that looks like a goat, a badge – the viewers finally types he knows nothing about a goat. More moving the hand over the keyboard and he states maybe the goat was in fact a deer? Maybe the goat is in the desert, the person might have been a soldier which is why he is seeing desert (sand) and yet more stabbing in the dark – here he is hoping the person might feed some info back, the person finally says he knows nothing of any of them.

Moving the person along

As none of his words have triggered this person into revealing some info he moves onto the fact that if the viewer is not helping, the spirit will in fact move on and all will be lost, how convenient is this? He explins the spirit is maybe a lost soul while he was on this earth and is trying to get a message back to this person? maybe this person (the viewer) is lost and is in need of direction? He then states he sees that the viewer may have a problem with drugs, he knows someone with drug problems or drugs might feature later on in life.

Wait one minute here, how sweeping a statement is that, that about covers most people I know but the viewer states he is not on drugs and knows nobody who is on them. The Spirit at this point has grown tired and has moved on – how very convenient right? He finally said he can read the viewers energy via the internet and states he has a problem with his chest or knows someone with a chest problem – thats like saying have you see rain or know of someone who has seen it – your going to get a result right?

How these people work

I remember from my younger says on how these so called spiritualist work, the goal is always to start with a key word and work from there, at some point the person will start to fill in the blanks and the rest is easy right?

Example: I ask you if you had a dog once, I see a little dog, I got it wrong thugh and you had a big dog, I can see your eye light up when I said dog but loose interest when I mentioned it was little. I quickly change my story so the dog is now larger (the fog is thick to see and all that) and away we go.

I won’t post a link to this fake but it was funny to watch all the same

The Streaming site Justin.TV has made a few core changes “for the good of the end users” and this has caused some head scratching in my behalf as to why would they feel that these would be a “good” thing? The first thing they did is introduce a new player which now has a constant bar on the bottom.

This means when you embed the player, instead of been hidden away (the controls) until you need them – they are right in your face. My Guess is too many people had no idea where the volume control was and such on the old player. Next up we have splitting of Chat rooms – when it feels there is too many in one room, it puts you in room 2 and so forth. What this means is the mods will be in room 1 while people are going wild in room 2. I have not come across an IRC Server that has problems with 200+ people in and feels the need to split into more rooms, I have no idea what this achieves. Lastly then – the IOS Justin.TV player / broadcaster which used to be free is now $4.99 – wow is all I can say and I suspect nobody will buy this anytime soon.

I also heard (through the grapevine) that they are extending the channel bans for anyone playing music, a lot of people play music in the background and banning them will drive people away. They have to do this I guess for copyright issues.

One of my past times is to sit and watch various shows on both Justin.TV and Ustream. A person who goes by the name of Ron Knights (from the USA) went on about how he wanted an iPad as he could sit on his couch with the ipad and watch the streams instead of sitting in front of the computer all the time. I tried to explain that streaming was not up to much on the iPad due to the fact there is no adobe flash installed – so it is with this, I made this quick video.

Options available

Justin.TV have a free application that is designed for the iPhone and this shows due to have the 2x in the corner and the blocky appearance. You can go look via category and even sign in and find the stream you want. The problem creeps in though when watching a stream, considering I am on Wireless N and the router is like behind me – there should be no dropping of any signal when trying to watch a stream but after a few minutes it starts to break up and given long enough (10 minutes at max) it will finally come to a stop. What is even more important here is how long it take to finally start the stream – just what is it doing we ask? If it is buffering – then why does it fail when watching the live stream?

Usteam also have an application (also free) which is once again an iPhone version and you have the 2x in the corner. Unlike the Justin Application, this is limited on how you are meant to find the stream you want and the search has proven to not find what I want 90% of the time. Once you do pick a stream though it does start it quickly and plays it without falling apart.

If the streaming is not part of those two, then you are plain out of luck I am afraid. You can go to the App store and buy Skyfire for example which will set you back $4.99 but having tested this already on the free Android version – I can tell you that BitGravity Streams does not work as planned – so save your money.

Is the Android any better?

Justin produce only a streaming App and not a viewer application which means you need to try and view them through Skyfire which works but the quality is not all that good. Ustream works just fine and as I already mentioned, any BitGravity type streams do not work either way. At least with the Android device I do not have to keep buying applications to try and watch streams.

Conclusion

As streaming is hard coded flash type thing, you are going to struggle to replace the desktop to sit and watch streams on an iPad, no matter how magical you think it is, this is one area that is not happening.

Although I am not streaming a great deal, I do tinker from time to time with Wirecast, in case your not sure what Wirecast is or does – then head to there website for the full low-down. The last time this software broke was in Version 3 when Apple updated Quicktime and it just so happens that Quicktime recently had an update. I Started Wirecast today and was met with the Watermark, this only happens in the Demo Version by chance. I checked my Preferences and sure enough, there is no Serial listed:

Re-adding the serial

I dug out my email with the serial listed, tried to add it and this came up:

Not a problem I told myself and I removed all traces of Wirecast from the machine, I even went into the registry and removed all traces of my serial number (found it in two places), got rid of any wirecast stuff in ‘Program Files’ and local profile. I tried it again but the above screen just came back up – this meant the key was hidden someone else but I am not sure were.

Anyone else have this problem or just me? I have logged a support call and made a forum post - lets hope they get back to me soon with a fix.

First the issue started with Justin.TV and then later on visiting the Ustream main page – I got the above error. This leads me to believe that they may be swapping things around on the back end, introducing new features maybe? This is probably the first time I have come across the sites displaying this type of info and having actual downtime. Did this stop anybody from broadcasting? Did you notice the numbers much lower than normal? Did you get some warning of this before it happened?

If you pop along to any show on Justin, they include some figures on the bottom of each show which shows you how many people are currently viewing the show (if live), how many people follow the show and finally how many ‘views’ that show has had. These figures are great but what confused me was how a show that had 35-50 people while live managed to have almost 1 million views yet another show that had well over 1000 people while live (and it was live for many hours) only just managed to break through the 1 Million viewer barrier while the first show I mentioned was now at 2 million – go figure right!

How the Views work

Each time a person goes to that stream, the view count goes up by one, if you refresh the page, this adds another one to that total. What if that person goes to the show page and then is informed that the chat is on another page – so they head off to this said page and we add another one to that total. If the show is featured on the front page or the side bar, people landing on the site or the section then adds yet more views to that total.

How to cheat that number (and make your show look popular)

If you use Firefox as your browser and you add in TabMixPlus Extension, you have the ability to ‘reload’ the page on a timer. Given that it takes so long for the Justin.TV page to load sometimes, let us set this to 30 seconds. As Firefox is a Tabbed Browser, you can load the page on a few tabs and of course multiply this across many computers (and virtual machines).

To tally up the sums then – each machine has Firefox loaded and has 5 Tabs open, there is a total of 4 machines and it reloads every 30 seconds. Give these rather low numbers, one person alone can get 40 views every minute or 2400 an hour. Left untouched for 24 hours, that’s 57,600 views – quite impressive right?

How it can be made better

It is easy for Justin to record a single IP as one view count and then no matter how many times I reload the page (cheating or otherwise) or how many times a person comes that day, it will be one view and give a much more accurate number. Like anything based on stats, it is easy to manipulate such as making your listen count on Last.FM go up faster.

One last thought

If a show is playing 24/7, what purpose does Following a show do? If you go to your main page, it will show you it is on-line but of course it is not live but rather “Pre-Recorded”. Another thought, if there is 100′s of people in the chat room yet only a handful are talking, what purpose does that serve?

As ISP’s provide faster bandwidth speeds, webcams get higher resolution and computers get faster and more core’s – it begs the question – can you now stream in full HD resolution to offer the best video possible as well do it on a free service? I recently watched what was claimed to be full blown HD Stream but after making this full screen and seeing ‘jaggies’ on the diagonal lines (such as the nose for example) – I questioned if this was really HD and what was at fault.

Bandwidth requirements

• 720p60: 1280×720 gives 0,92 megapixels per frame. If we take a 24-bit color value per pixel (RGB), this means 2,76 MB data per frame, which multiplied with the 60fps gives 1,3 Gbps or 165 MB/s.
• 1080i60: 1920×1080 means a 2 megapixel frame which translates into 6,2MB per frame. The interlacing cuts the bitrate in half: 6,2MB x 60 / 2 = 1,49 Gbps or 186 MB/s.
• 1080p60 is obviously double the throughput of 1080i: 2,98 Gbps or 373 MB/s

Hardware

I am using the Logitech 9000 Pro and going from the spec’s page:

• High-definition video (up to 1600 X 1200*) – * Enhanced from native 2-MP sensor.
• 720p widescreen mode with recommended system

Now when I tested this HD mode – I need to add that it was dark and only had one light on – that means the camera had to work harder and probably make the image worse that it could have been.

The testing enviroment

Using the Core i7 machine armed with Flash media encoder 3.1 – I set the input and output to 1280×720 at 25fps, the bandwidth to 950 for video and the total bandwidth needed was 1014kbps. In theory I have 1500kbps – so I should have some headroom.  I also recreated the same settings on Wirecast and go to work recording some content and taking some pictures.

The first thing I noticed on Wirecast broadcasting was it was not as crisp even on preview and if you click the picture above to get the full resolution you can see that there is jaggy lines on the cup, the laptop and the words are not that clear.

Now let is turn to Flash Media Encoder 3.1 – straight away you should notice the much sharper picture, the lack of jaggies on the laptop, how easy it is to read the text. The lines you can see running through the picture is the camera trying hard to compensate for low light.

Thoughts

Wirecast will probably get better in Version 4 – as of now it downgrades the quality of either a webcam or a screen capture (a game for example). FME on it’s own of course cannot do camera swtiching live or capture the desktop but armed with the right programs, you could go so way to get them features.

The bottom line is just because you *think* you are broadcasting in HD does not mean the end result is true HD Quality. The stream above for example is still worse in Quality than a proper 720P Movie – streaming has a long way to go yet.

I thought I would revisit the age old Ustream.TV vs. Justin.TV debate and look at how they have changed, problems encountered and write something from the end-users point of view – after all without people visiting and interacting with the chat, you might as well be talking to yourself. The quick background is that these sites along with others allow anyone with a webcam and a microphone to stream a live show, anything from pointing the webcam at some kittens to a full blow show with lower 3rds and transitions.

Ustream.TV

The first thing your going to notice if your not using an AdBlocker is the large number of adverts all over the place, both on the page itself and inside the video. The adverts come in and last for 30 seconds, this is even before you get to see the content on offer. They have a chosen streamer on the front page, this used to be the little guys before but now it features the larger stars. Along the top we have the sections but this is not all of the sections, you will not see ‘Tech’ Listed on there – for this we need to look at ‘All Live’ and drill down to the correct section.

A Look down the Tech Section will normally not bring you anything computer related as such but should you find a show you want to see – this is were it started to fall apart. You can be logged in but as soon as you type, the chat tell’s you that you need to log in and provides a login box. With some luck, you may get around to actually typing something but even though Ustream provide a IRC Server (of sorts) – most Tech people seem to have there own IRC Server and for you to venture off onto this new site of you want to chat. Before I go on about a separate IRC Server, there is more bugs – the chat does not scroll as people type (sometimes it does) and this is very annoying indeed having to keep scrolling down to see what is been said.

My Feeling on this IRC Server thing is of course two fold, I can fire up an IRC Client and chat away with the video listed (even on a separate computer) but I would only do this if I knew the person already. What I suspect will happen is people will stay on the Ustream page and not chat but just watch until they get bored (will not take long) thus you have now lost some visitors.

The other aspect of Ustream is the person streaming has to press record to save the show for later viewing but most do not it seems and unless you are there at the time, there is no way to go back over what is been watched or to watch later in the case of people with different time zones. If you do not feel part of the cast, you probably will not come back.

Justin.TV

This is much like Ustream, adverts coming at you thick and fast – the most annoying is the one played inside the video and a lot of times it will display an advert over the lower 3rds and even worse, a full screen popout for Poker, advised you go in with Firefox and adblock to get a better experience (Chrome and adblock does not block them it seems).

The Video part offers all of the controls inside the video so when you mouse over, you can mute, full screen and so forth. The chat for most part works, its not great but it scrolls down and if you are logged in, it works. They do run a sort of IRC server but make it next to impossible to connect to (White lists and such). Once again we see a lot of people diverting the chat to an IRC Server of choice – this means leaving the site of course.

The best feature though is the ability for the last 24 hours worth of broadcast to be automatically recorded – this means as long as the producer does not disable this feature – you can catch up with the last few shows. What is even better with this method is I can skip through a 2 hour show with great speed once it has buffered up. This feature alone is what I feel is good about Justin and I get to watch a lot of shows from people on a much different time zone and keep up with what they have been doing.

Thoughts

As a viewer to shows, if the show is on too late for UK people such as a show starting at 8:30pm EST – then the chance of me tuning in even on a Saturday is slim to none. If there is a way for me to catch up easily (such as Justin recorded feature) then I will probably keep up to date with what that show is doing but if they only record the odd segment or none at all – I will probably never get to see this show ever. To give a analogy, imagine a TV Show you heard about was on TV at 2am, unless you really wanted to see this you would neither stay up for this or set something up to record that show but had you the chance to ‘catch up tv’ and watch the show at your convenience, you may love that show and stay up late for the next one and so forth.

Should the die hard Ustream people stick with there choice and the low numbers or jump ship (like the rest) and come to Justin? If somebody keeps visiting your streaming page even on a recorded segment (and NOT Streamed over and over like many do) – they will learn of your website and you shall have more followers.