David Emery Online

Everythingstream

2 July 2007

Two post caught my eye over the weekend, floating above the iPhone tsunami (apparently the iPhone accounted for 1.5% of all blog posts over the weekend): Eventstreaming: The Seed Of A Revolution & iPhone and the future of news.

I think eventstreaming* and lifestreaming are the start of something big.

Just like blogging before it had to wait until the technology was right – readily available web servers and easy to use software in that case – the same is true for eventstreaming; only now are we beginning to have both readily available wireless bandwidth (in the form of both WiFi and 3G mobile access combined with unlimited data plans) and small compact video recorders (in the form of mobile phones) coupled with the ubiquitous computing power needed to process all the data.

Sure, all these things together in one place are still relatively rare, but we’re just at the start here.

We’re still waiting for the true killer app for eventstreaming – the YouTube or the Flickr – but surely it’s just a matter of time. Ustream is the biggest player in this market (which was really popularised by Justin on justin.tv), but I don’t see them as the endgame – they’re just too difficult for the lay-person to use, and the viewer experience is pretty poor. Most of those problems could be solved though with a little thought and design – if in doubt, they could always do what YouTube did and just rip off Flickr (WWFD?).

No, the real problem – yet to be solved well – is how to record video on the go. Justin.tv uses a backpack full of cobbled together electronics and a web-cam which isn’t really a practical proposition for most people. What we need – fairly obviously – is a decent mobile phone video transmission app, that streams over 3G to a server that then re-broadcasts it. Once we’ve got that then the barrier to entry is low enough for practically everyone, and that’s when it gets really interesting.

I love the idea of “live” news; already live-blogging and twittering have had a big effect on my consumption of news, from the big story to the small; when the 7/7 bombings took place one of the best sources for news I found were blogs, which – due to their distributed nature – managed to keep abreast of events quicker then the traditional news outlets. Similarly, but on a much smaller scale, via Twitter I quite often have about a 10 minute warning on an approaching storm as people to the west of me frequently twitter “yuck it just started raining”. That’s certainly a lot more accurate then any whether forecast I’ve seen before.

The addition of video into this equation just makes it so much more useful – being able to see how bad the traffic on the M4 is by someone stuck in it, for example, or watching live as your favourite band plays a guerilla gig on a train. Many people will worry about the privacy concerns but, sadly for them, it’s too late; today’s generation have been brought up without privacy, and concern about it is far lower with them then it is in older generations. They’re all on MySpace and Facebook – you can read what they think and feel so how is video any worse?

Eventstreaming, lifestreaming, everythingstreaming.

It’s disruptive. It’s controversial. It’s the future.