Bencredible

The MOST IMPORTANT part of video is audio.  If it sounds bad people will leave.  It is too low people will leave.  If it is too high people will leave.  On the other hand your video can look awful, so long as you have great audio they will stay.   Oh yeah, content is important too, but everyone on the face of the planet like space travel and everyone likes me, so I’m good there.

I was going to be ecstatic at my pure brilliance and awesomeness in doing the almost-impossible, but audio got in the way.

Yesterday I wrote about how I was trying to get an HD video setup for $6,000.  Lo and behold I got it to work this evening.  All of it.  I can switch between multiple HD sources, I can add HD graphics and HD CG, heck I can even run HD clips all from the latest beta of CamTwist.  Oh, I even got the streaming to a PC down.  I just send the signal out of my DVI port and in to the PC via a Blackmagic Intensity Pro card and right there in Flash Media Encoder I can steam it live.  Does it look stunning you ask?  Of course it does!  http://www.spacevidcast.com/test/ is where I’m playnig with this.  Watch that live video and you’ll soon notice a problem:  the audio happens a full second before the video.

Crap.

So I’m a lot closer than I was yesterday, but now I’m stuck agian.  In my studio the video is delayed by the HDMI capture card by at least a second, possibly close to 2 seconds.  This means that the lip sync is all off and won’t work at all.  I’m using a low-end PC I had laying around, but when I get a higher end box to stream and you can see all 30 frames per second, this will be a really big issue.

I’m looking at solutions from Soundflower, Audio Hijack and possibly some way to delay the incoming audio on the PC input card.  I *might* be able to use one of the Blackmagic Intensity outputs to go HDMI to HDMI and send the digital audio down the line with the video.  Unknown at this time.  I’m also trying to find any hardware that can act as an analog audio delay line on the cheap.  If anyone knows how to delay only the analog audio either on the Macintosh output or the PC input, I would be greatly appreciative!

So close yet so far away.

SpaceVidcast.com started with around 250 live viewers, skyrocketed to 450 and held there for a while. Then the stream crashed and we were back down to 200 viewers. From there the viewership has been steadily declining until at the writing of this post we’re under 100 live viewers (83 to be exact).

I was expecting about 20 to 40 live viewers of the launch and about 5 live viewers during the down times, so 100 viewers is still well above my expectations. I had a feeling, and apparently a correct one, that people would get bored after the launch and start to bail. While space flight is the future of humanity it oddly has a very inhuman face. This creates a problem for viewership as people want a human connection and NASA TV simply does not offer that.

The solution is painfully simple yet quite complex. I have 1/2 of it online now by burning a chat room directly in to the video stream. The other half comes in the form of actually getting on camera and talking with people live, interacting with them. The trick here is timing. I have a full time time (well over 40 hours a week) and that makes it hard to squeeze in time to broadcast and get people excited about this stuff.

There are other ways to draw an audience as well. This show has zero marketing right now. I’m streaming simply to see if it can be done and to learn for my weekly show. I’ll be advertising for the weekly show so I expect/hope viewership will be higher for that. I’ll also try and get more compelling content over each show to keep people interested and excited. I think with all of these things we’ll have a winning combination.

So why do I care about viewership of a re-broadcast of NASA TV? I’m not even producing the show! I’m hoping to get NASA and space flight in front of people who have never really been interested in it before or are a little interested but simply never vested the time. These people don’t go to NASA.gov and look for the live steam. These people don’t go out of their way to learn this stuff, they stumble across it and if it interests them they stay. That means that the more viewers I have the more interested people we were able to bring in. The more that drop off, the more bored they get. Viewers are finicky and won’t come back if they get too bored too often. Thus, I need to be careful here. I went a little twitter happy these last few days, so I think it is time to scale it all back a touch before the huge events like landing occur and we do our first weekly show.

All in all this has been a great experiment. I’m happy with how it turned out and while I’m sad the viewership is declining I’m a little happy that my theories on how viewership would start to decline rapidly were correct. I’m ecstatic that the viewership scale was so much higher than anticipated. For a show that I figured would be a fun side hobby, this may turn in to a venture worth something. That’s great news as advertising can get spend-y.

For now the really high viewership has come to an end. I expect it to climb back around 200 to 250 during the days and under 100 at night. 450+ was fun while it lasted, but I’ll need to put a human face on NASA before I’ll be able to get back to 450 let alone the 1,000+ that I really want. So far we have had over 25,000 views of the stream, so not too shabby for something I was not quite prepared to do.

First an update on SpaceVidcast.com. Site is coming along nicely. The live stream is up and counting down to the STS-123 launch.

The UStream.tv banner is complete and I think it looks really nice:

While the Spacevidcast thing is wrapping up I’m starting two other projects. One is a lifecast of sorts. This is my replacement to the Technology Evangelist podcasts, but a wee bit different. I have set up my office with audio and video and I am setting up my home office with similar equipment. I’ll be doing off-the-cuff technology shows live and recording them and doing a little TubeMogul distribution of sorts. Unlike the TE shows where you had to tune in at a specific time, this you will be able to watch 24×7. Unlike lifecasting where 95% of it is boring in this scenario we’ll be switching between streams and people to keep the conversation going. Should be a lot of fun. Look for more info here later.

The next project I’m working on is part of the TechCompass.com network. This is still in formation so I can’t say too much. Not because it is confidential but because I simply don’t know yet. More deets on this project as I bring the lifecasting project online and Spacevidcast becomes a well oiled machine.

All of this AND I have a full time job. Early in the week I will be deploying new anti-virus software to replace an aging Trend Micro system, deploying a new backup solution, fixing the date/time problem on a few really old servers, and just generally keeping the system running.

My time will be stretched pretty thin, but in the end I believe the new media projects are well worth it. My past is in media, my future will be in media. Media is what I love to do, it is what I was born for. I’m good at Information Technology (IT), I’m *great* at live TV and I love the new Internet live streaming. Monetization here I come!

I took some of the work Bluefox did and modified it to be actual advertising banners for the upcoming STS-123 mission. There are currently some issues with Endeavour’s UHF radio which may delay launch, but if not then you may start to see something along these lines on UStream.tv:

Bluefox has not yet approved these designs, so he may come back and say “they look awful, what are you thinking?????” Personally, I like the one with the shuttle taking off (secret: the orbiter in all the pictures is Atlantis and not Endeavour. Shhhhhhhh).

The launch of STS-123 is coming up (hopefully) on March 11th in the wee hours of the morning. I wanted to get at least one on-demand show out the door for SpaceVidcast.com as well as prep for live coverage of STS-123. A couple things were missing though, namely a web site design. Sure we have the logos for the live show and whatnot, but no web site. Bluefox to the rescue!

Web Design version 1 (click for larger version)

Large Banner

Standard Ad Banner

Small Ad Banner

Vertical Ad Banner

Some of the text needs to change before I start using the banners. I would like to partner up with sites like NASASpaceFlight.com and Spaceflightnow.com. To do that I don’t want to compete with their core audience who will be reading breaking news. My goal is to bring awareness to the masses on why space flight is important for humanity, why it is worth the billions and billions of dollars it takes and frankly to get people excited about space travel again.

I’m testing a new build of CamTwist. Rather than just run it on my desktop I decided I should probably try streaming it live to see what happens. Below is my live video and chat room:

Not that long ago I sent in my own Good Question to WCCO asking why they were not broadcasting their news in HD. The beautiful irony is that I send in that very question in, wait for it… HD!

Today I found out that while WCCO news may not be HD (yet) they do have a twitter account for breaking news stories. Ok, cool and good first step to getting my attention. Then I dig a bit deeper and find that not only do they have a Twitter account but they also have at least one N95-3 cameraphone that they are playing with.

WCCO is not sure how they are going to use it yet. Does one go for the Qik angle and stream breaking news directly from the phone? Should they walk the studio during a live broadcast and give a behind-the-scenes view of the show? Is there another angle that they can use the device for and really push the boundaries of new media? I don’t have an answer to these questions yet (mostly because they don’t know either) but I have a feeling that they will be doing something very cool, very soon.

My suggestion to WCCO News: do it all.

WCCO News isn’t known for getting the younger crowd but I think if they start to hit all of the new media markets they will slowly get there. I’m speaking as someone in the 18-30 year old demographic here. Go HD (don’t tell me it is expensive, I used to do R&D for HD studios far larger than yours, I know exactly how expensive it is, suck it up). Get on Twitter not only for breaking news but for other station personalities as well. Get on Facebook and MySpace for all of these personalities too. Have a nightly UStream.tv broadcast using something like the upcoming version of CamTwist that will allow you to cut between multiple cameras (one in the control room with ISO/IFB audio, one in the studio pointed backwards, one in the MCO, etc., etc.) Have Qik live streams that are linked to your Twitter account and bring these cameras out with you in the field. Bring us, your audience, in to the conversation. Make the news a community driven event again. Make your broadcast a social network in and of itself! Be innovators in Electronic News Gathering, push the envelope, force the other local stations to take notice. Heck, make CBS take notice. These technologies are incredibly inexpensive or in many cases free. All of them open you up to a whole new audience, some of which is even outside of Minnesota.

This is either going to be very exciting when WCCO starts to move forward, or they are going to get scared, back down and do something lame. Here’s hoping they just do it all.