It looks like the backlash against monolithic, overreaching social networks is growing faster than I thought. I’d brought up this sentiment earlier as I was watching the increasing unease with which each Facebook privacy update was received. Certainly the mammoth social network isn’t exactly plummeting in popularity, but such initial stirrings tend to underlie a [...]
Exploding video/audio bandwidth
“It’s a worldwide phenomenon,” P&G spokesman Paul Fox told the Cincinnati Enquirer. “As P&G drives toward end-to-end digitization of our business, ensuring bandwidth capacity within our networks is a high priority.” It’s true; video and, to a lesser degree, audio streaming are huge bandwidth hogs. It’s such an issue, in fact, that many access providers are [...]
Living on a Stream: The Rise of Real-Time Video
This post’s title is copied directly from an article posted yesterday on Wired by Steven Levy, a piece detailing his prognostications on live, streaming video and how he thinks it’ll become a mainstream thing within a decade. He’s so sure of it, in fact, that he’s made a bet with his friend Kevin Kelly. Steven [...]
Sendoid no more
While the now defunct Sendoid service may, on the surface, seem unrelated to SocialCastr, it is directly responsible for causing me more than one sleepless night ever since I first heard about it on BBC Click some time in the spring of 2011. I’d already been fiddling around with the core of the SocialCastr code for a few [...]
The silence of the webcams
The list of requirements for SocialCastr just got shorter. As of version 0.93 beta you no longer need video / audio hardware to stream your pre-recorded content to the world. The upcoming version supports FLV / F4V video files, and along with the Live Timeline, the stage is now set for some really nifty capabilities to be [...]
SocialCastr, the anti-social, anti-cloud network
I you managed to catch an earlier version of the slide presentation I currently have running on the front page you may have noticed that I referred to SocialCastr as “what the cloud should be”. I was wrong. So very wrong. Mostly. First of all, the term “cloud” is relatively new in the parlance of IT, but [...]
Choices
I was recently asked if Adobe’s decision to stop developing Flash for mobile browsers was troubling me; after all, a version of SocialCastr targets mobile. Well, SocialCastr runs much better as a mobile app anyways (and that’s gotten a renewed thumbs-up from Adobe), and the numbers elsewhere are bold and clear: desktop web usage is [...]
Ye Olde Timeline
I’m calling it the “Live Timeline”, at least for now; just sounds like someone out there at this point would have reserved that name for their product so I’m not getting married to it. But the name describes what it does pretty well. Live Timeline is a system built into SocialCastr for controlling video and [...]
Version 0.92 beta released
I probably should’ve put an exclamation point on that headline because this little version number includes many changes. You can try these out yourself by visiting: http://www.socialcastr.com/download.html Although this isn’t the whole v1.0 list, these updates do take a good chunk out of it. Here are the changes: Broadcastr Added Broadcast Setup panel which allows [...]
Keep in touch
The creation of SocialCastr can really be lumped into three main categories up until this point: 1. Research – RTMFP is not yet widely deployed in any meaningful peer to peer way. I had to read through lots of English-as-a-second language documentation and experimentation, not to mention running my own late-night hacking sessions since no [...]