Live from Boston University - College of Communication

Boston University - College of Communication, originally uploaded by stevegarfield. CC BY-NC-SA

Today's class at BU: Teaching Ustream.tv.

We went live on my Ustream.tv channel for a quick demo of Ustream and it's chat features.

Chris Pirillo Live is a good example of a live show.

Sign up for Ustream.tv.

I've found that Firefox works better than Safari. We ended up using the iSight camera from my MacBook Pro and the internal mic. It was pretty good quality. You can also use an attached USB mic and webcam.

If you want higher quality, hook up a video camera via Firewire. A Canon GL/2 is an example of a Firewire miniDV camera you could use. With that camera, you could also make use of any mic attached to the camera such as a Sennheiser Wireless Lav Mic.

Note: Check the ustream site for more tips on higher quality options. One is using a PC to broadcast with Flash Media Encoder.

See the Watershed site for paid broadcast options like having your own custom watermark on the video, customized player skins, and 16:9 and HD broadcast support. With the paid plan you get 500 GB total storage included, $0.30/GB thereafter.

It's a good idea to pre announce your show on sites like twitter and your blog and by sending out emails.

Start Broadcasting then Start Recording

Start broadcasting by clicking the BROADCAST NOW button.

After you start broadcasting live, you can chose to start recording, by pressing the Start Recording button. Conveniently, the Start Recording button changed into a Stop Recording button, so you don't have to hunt around for it after you start recording.

Here's the archived version that we recorded in class.

Online TV Shows by Ustream

Hmm. The YouTube video I played didn't seem to stream live although we saw it in class. I'll have to check that.

Some of the features we looked at in class were adding a text overlay and playing a YouTube video. You can also play an archived Ustream.tv video.

In addition to being archived on the ustream.tv site, you can also send the video to YouTube.

Send to YouTube
The way you do this is Go to My Videos, Click on the archived video that you want to work with, then Click “Add to YouTube”, Then you’ll see “Youtube upload in progress.”

Right now there is unlimited storage on Ustream, but when Ustream rolls out premium accounts, that will change.