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?

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.

I had a quick look to see if any progress was made over providing an actual adblocking tool for Google chrome and to my surprise the Firefox one is now ported across (in some shape or fashion) to chrome. The Extension can be added into Chrome and starts blocking adverts just like FireFox does. I tested it across various sites I just Know never worked before such as Justin.TV, YouTube and random other video related sites that inject adverts. The end result is now it all works – so back to chrome for the sheer speed – which is up to version 9 By the way).

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?

Justin.TV has its own chat and you can sort of connect via IRC instead of using the in-built chat client. A Much better way is to use a client written by Vaughn, its is a IRC Client with built in video viewer and takes up much less room. You can find the program HERE – enjoy. It is Windows only by the way.

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.

First for all the people that follow my blog, I would like to say sorry for the lack of posts of late, while I could have just re-posted news stories from other sources, I would prefer to write my own stuff if I can. As we move forward into Summer 2010, I have a feeling that people are moving away from there computers and back to the outside world and many have started to get fit, me included. The purpose of this post is to keep anybody who is wondering updated on my latest goings-on – enjoy…

Training

I start a new class in taekwondo on Monday (tomorrow), this is a 2 hour lesson, twice a week. This means I get back from work, get changed, something to eat and head off not long after to taekwondo – this takes me out of the loop Monday and Tuesday because by time I get back, I cannot imagine firing up Skype to have a chat with people. The next part id that although my home training has helped, I feel I need to join a proper gym, to this end I might join a local one and go there Wednesday and Friday leaving Thursday and Weekend Free.

I agree looking at this you might think I have gone training mad, I take this very seriously and it was about time I stopped sitting in front of the computer for no reason really. I may even get back to riding my bike (pedal) if the weather holds up.

Streaming

While I used to enjoy firing up Justin.TV or Ustream, these days it seems that unless I run Firefox with Adblock – there is a LOT of adverts and I mean 30 second advert before I watch the stream and then in-stream adverts blocking what is on the bottom. The other side is that most of the Tech Streams are Pre-recorded – I 100% Fail to see the point of this. The best way I can see is that Justin.TV allow automatic recording which lasts for 6 days (you can also make highlights from this to keep forever) – enough time for me to re-watch and skip through streams that use this feature. Pre-Recorded reminds me of cassette tape, I have to listen to it in order – not my idea of fun. I slowly start to grow tired of this as a medium and might start looking for other idea’s to take up my time.

Skype

The time difference aside, I have started to notice a trend, by this I mean I can have Skype running from 6pm to 11pm (UK time) and nobody rings me but as soon as they want some help – bang, they are on there. This started with a few people and has grown of late – this means all I am good for is tech help and outside of this, I guess I must be boring or have little to chat about? Makes sense if you think about it – I used to be heavily into streaming and now I am not.

Contact Us Form

I placed on the site a “Contact Us” and this allowed people to send me a email but hide my email address unless I replied to them. It seems the spammers have took this as a means to send me complete junk. I have removed this feature for now until I can think of a better way.