blogtv.com review

June 11th, 2007 · 2 Comments

There are a bunch of services which allow you to stream live video for free to whoever wants to watch. I am very interested in these services, as I enjoy hosting live talk shows online. So far, I have had success using a commercial service, Avacaster, for work, but at home, I’d love to have access to a free service…or even a cheap one. I’m willing to pay a little.

Anyway, Bill Cammack, a pro video editor and micromedia mogul living in NYC enouraged me to check out blogtv.com. There are a couple of good things about it. Blog TV allows for:

Two video sources at once, with the option of the person who initiated the session to change the 2nd source at will. That means I can host the show from Washington DC and have a cohost on live if they are in Timbuktu. And then I can switch to a correspondent in Kalamazoo. That is cool. One thing that is interesting is that the viewer can control who’s video is displayed bigger, the host or the cohost.
Text chat. All viewers and hosts can text chat in real time. This allows for very fun and productive interaction.
Ability to webcast whenever. No need to preschedule your show
It is free

Unfortunately, there are SERIOUS shortcomings with the current version of blogtv.com:

Archiving problem #1: You can only archive the video and audio of the person who initiates the webcast. If you have a cohost, or cohosts they will not be recorded. This is a huge shortcoming, making any recording of a webcast with a cohost practically useless.

Archiving problem #2: The webcast only archives in 15 minute segments. So after 15 minutes a window pops up asking you to type in some metadata about the recording (title, description, tags) and then you have to hit record again to record the next segment. This is lame.

Archiving problem #3: On one occasion when the window popped up asking me to fill in metadata about a 15 minute segment, it wouldn’t let me enter anything in the window. My typing appeared only in the chat window. Then it wouldn’t let me just hit save for the segment without entering data into the save window. Catch 22. I just closed my browser…I think ending the session.

So I have some more suggestions, but these seem the most serious to me. I’d love to use blogtv.com, but for my needs, it just ain’t there yet.

Here’s an example of what the archive from blogtv.com look like. Note the long gaps when my cohost is talking and nothing gets recorded……..Ugly.

So congrats to blogtv.com for getting their service up there, now please make it better. Pretty please?

Tags: video · Jonny Interviews People · Interviews · media musings · social media

2 responses so far ↓

Oren Levy // Jun 13, 2007 at 12:00 am

Thank you for your feedback.
We will definitely address the items you talked about.
novak // Jul 4, 2007 at 7:38 pm

try operator11.com, the host can switch up to 10 streams, i think, & it all gets recorded, ..plus you can mix in videos, which is a great feature..another one i havent tried yet is mogulus.

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