Broadcast Skype: Look Ma, No Truck

Via andydickinson.net...

More broadcasters are willing to use Skype in tight spots, and (no surprise) finding that a nice camera improves the image. Here's an excerpt from KGMB9 in Hawaii:

"As Hurricane Felicia headed towards the Hawaiian Islands (The Big Island and Maui in particular) in these past 72 hours, all of the local news stations had to make some smart decisions. Who would go to what island and how would the video be relayed back to the news rooms here on Oahu. Shipping the live trucks was no longer an option for anyone. And flying our video back on cargo flights had the risk of being held because of the weather. So what to do?

On August 11th at 5:00 am from the property of the Maui Seaside Hotel all four Honolulu TV stations broadcast their reporters live from Maui …. via Skype."

See also similar reports by Al Tompkins at Poynter and Broadcasting & Cable, and the AEP roundup of live web video resources from April, Overview of live video over the internet.

Update: Lost Remote posted Skype outage good reminder for TV newsrooms in December 2010.

Spam & Free To Air

Awhile back Smith-Micro introduced DTV4PC, and it still has a heavy e-mail spam strategy that promises to turn PCs into complete entertainment centers. As Vodyo (a blog about online TV) explained last year, the DTV4PC is $30 software that aggregates Free To Air (FTA) channels and packages access with a custom user interface and search function.

What's interesting is that FTA channels are already free to anyone with an internet connection or satellite dish. There's even a website that aggregates the online versions of these channels: World Wide Internet TV, wwiTV.com. It's a great way to check out marginal television from all over the world -- here's something from Europe for weathercasters who are bored with props like rubber duckies and umbrellas:



Something similar to wwiTV programming but just from the USA is AmericaFree.tv, which uses QuickTime streaming. And though everyone knows the best ones already, more options for both free and pay models are listed at the dateless and aged Daily IPTV articles A TV Guide For IPTV: 100 of the Best Internet TV Channels and IPTV Startups to Watch.

Live hurricane video and data

First, from USA Today there's an image pan of a child's eye view of hurricane flood waters.

Beet.TV notes that Gannett Has Live Hurricane Coverage on Mogulus Platform....msncbc.com has New Flash Hurricane Tracker.

NBC's hurricane tracker is nicely interactive but has no video. By the way, another nice weather site is Weather Underground. Google Earth has been used to visualize tracking data from Hurricane Hunters planes, but it's can be complicated, so see Google Earth Blog and Google Earth Design on the Tropical Atlantic visualization effort.

The Gannett widget pictured below integrates several live feeds from Mogulus (the embedding was imperfect).