Hey everyone...
Just wanted to give you guys a heads up in case you didn't know about it... but I've just been blown away by a social networking widget this weekend called "Stickam" .... Basically, anyone with a webcam can now embed streaming live video into a website...
http://www.stickam.com
http://labs.stickam.com
This site is currently dominated by the myspace / teenage crowd, but the potential applications are fairly mindboggling.
They've got free radio broadcasting in the works... I'm sure it doesn't scale like icecast, but still... for a small site... it could be fantastic.
Personally, I'm currently exploring a possible use for hosting online conference calls / educational meetings / etc. But... IMHO this is ... some ... seriously... cool stuff.
[They also have an API... which means to me that they might be a good place to develop / work with in the future.... ]
Peace and love,
Albert
Comments
Cool, thanks for the heads
Cool, thanks for the heads up. For art & music, this could potentially be a great way to earn some income by charging for live performances broadcast via the net. Sell some tickets to an exclusive online performance and broadcast it virtually for next to nothing. To me this is much more profitable than trying to sell MP3 downloads, since MP3s are much more products than they are experiences. People care about being part of something that happens in real-time since it is a unique experience for them, much like buying tickets to see a live performance of an artist they love.
I have a hunch we'll start to see a trend where marketers try to emphasize "experiences" over "products", since trying to sell digital products is difficult, costly, and time consuming due to the duplicability of digital media. Selling a ticket is a much simpler process and people feel motivated to buy their own ticket since taping it or watching it later on video detracts from the overall experience.
Aside from the commercial implications of such developments, I can see this being a useful tool for e-learning and collaboration.
Farsheed
Great recommendation
I've been wondering when that would take over. I'm currently working on trying to get the webcam module and the chatroom module working together and I read in this group about making suggestions in the wiki but I could not find a suggestion box or how to get involved. Bascially wanted to allow members in a drupal powered site the same ability like stickam.com. This is probably the hardest part of a combination of these two modules...I might just have to make some sort of extention of the chatroom instead since it's not working out correctly and keeps just switching to the webcam instead of staying in the room and have a block on the side for the webcam. Thought about popups also which I'm looking into.
cucme
umh ... not that i don't like it, very cute and nicely done but concerning innovation - is'nt it just was cucme have been since 1995?
/markus
/markus
Browser-based
The marked difference is that this is via a browser-based interface, making it accessible to anybody who doesn't know how or doesn't want to install new software on their computer. Also worth mentioning is Userplane (they do pretty much the same sort of thing) who actually has a Drupal Module (I've not tested it).
The lame thing about both is the Flash Video Server requirement (albeit hidden at the ASP level), which is an expensive, proprietary beast. This should be broken wide open when there's better XMPP support in Flash and it would make an awesome Drupal module :)
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Matt Koglin, Antinomia Solutions