Live streaming video: The next trend to watch?

The technology to show live video on the Web is generally limited to desktop cameras or the occasional geared up gearhead who can walk around with a helmut cam.  But in January Robert Scoble pulled off live streaming video 'on the go' with a supercharged cell phone at Davos.  And now You Tube's Steve Chen has let it slip that You Tube will be supporting live video this year.  The new tech trends show Pop 17 grabbed that scoop, which you can see in Steve Outing's post: The next trend to watch.

Newspaper.coms have to start figuring out how to do live video streams.  But while the technology available today might allow for herky-jerky news conferences, the truth is it's going to be a while before anything can supplant  the very expensive TV news microwave  infrastructure to stream spot news.

Five video blogs that do it right

Last week I chatted with the TDMN video reporting interest group that Victor Godinez has been leading.  We discussed the different forms of video journalism that seem to be most effective on the Web.  Now Jennifer Woodard Maderazo writes about the Best Use of the Medium::5 Videoblogs That Do It Right.

"Live News Cameras" online

A former colleague of mine in the Bay Area, Andrew Finlayson, (he's ND at Fox in Chicago now) pinged me tonight to let me know about a beta site they threw together just in the last 3 weeks.

http://www.livenewscameras.com/

It's basically a page with live streams from all their Fox TV video feeds around the country... and in the upper right he's got one staffer with a simple webcam sitting at her computer screen telling anyone who is watching which stream is 'hot' right now. She just called out to us that if we clicked on the Washington 2 feed, for instance, we'd see Hillary right now as she comes out to talk live. And I did, and I watched Hillary's speech in a window in the middle.

This is a terrific concept. Here's how Andrew described it for me:

We are aggregating all the live feeds we can get on this day. We think of this as an experiment on many levels. Is the platform stable, will the audience like it, will they come back, does unfiltered news work, can we help moderate it with a light hand, can we find more news sources to point to, does the concept expand, what does it say about democracy and the future of journalism if we can start streaming every kind of news event…politics, weather, business, etc.

A colleague did most of the programming, we sort of glued together different ideas and we thought Super Tuesday would be the perfect day to try it out.

And they did it in 3 weeks.