Learn 4 Life

Live Broadcast Streaming for Free (or almost) - The Revolution will be Televised from your Front Room

We are experimenting with Mogulus to push out live broadcasts from various educational events in the future - we may even be pointing the camera at our Second Life Island and showing events happening live there! Having invested in a T-Mobile web and walk portable modem combined with a Macbook Pro and a good DV camera - we’re now able to stream live video from anywhere!!

This is another in a stream of firsts for Learn 4 Life this year. Part of what we do is make the technology transparent and easy to use - by combining these two we can immediately create a new learning dynamic.

This was something unthinkable even a few months ago because it was prohibitively expensive. Welcome to live citizenship broadcasting from your school or college.

We’re playing about with the Mogulus system for the next few days in the evening - so if you want to see the tests (if you are that sad) then either click on the pic above or tune into :

http://www.L4L.co.uk/mog/mog_test.html

We’ll be testing a variety of cameras and systems over the next few weeks. But we are determined to prove that this is doable - well it is doable - very doable and schools should immediately think about this or a similar system. The web and walk system costs £29.99 a month. The equivalent was an old outside broadcast unit van parked on your doorstep trailing wires all over the place - so the choice is hire an outside Broadcast unit - a few thousand pounds or use Mogulus, a broadband modem or equivalent system - free - well you can see the choice….

As with all Learn 4 Life projects we go out on a limb financially and pedagogically to see if the tech is possible and then see where it can be embedded in education - taking risks where you don’t have to. If you are going to use this as a broadcast mechanism for your institution please please make sure you have the vid permission slips signed off and the admin done.

So far we’re very impressed with the Mogulus system but we’d like to see an archival / retrieval function in there it really would make a difference and we’re still trying to work out how to drop in vids we have uploaded. But it’s early days and we will be pushing out vid further into the summer especially at different events we attend. Now, any advertisers out there want some product placement?

So what does this mean for traditional broadcasters - well it’s quite a big deal really. Now anyone can turn up to an event and with a laptop, portable broadband modem and a webcam can broadcast out a live streamed event on their own TV channel live and in real time.

This small but very significant way to effect complete personalised media will shift the whole balance of citizenship broadcasting in favour of a bottom up, peer to peer model. It is just another nail in the coffin of traditional broadcast models and will continue the revolution towards smart distributed learning mechanisms in the near future. The Revolution will be Televised and it’s being broadcast from your FRONT ROOM, classroom or school hall - now imagine that! Any schools up for it - you bet they will be when they see this…so pass on the word.

Imagine what it is going to do for political activism alone - people will be sending out video straight from the event as it happens - no editing and no mediation from larger TV firms.We’ll predict that the media companies will pay “stringers” and citizen journalists to take their feed. Watch this space - We’d reckon this technology will become trivial within 3 months.

No firewalls, no lockdowns - as it happens. Our guess is that this will be one of the no-brainers among the teaching community and will work its way through the ranks in matter of weeks. Go give it a try - tha precious window of time at this time of year where SATs are over and you have a small bit of spare time - go and test the system - broadcast your school - who needs Teachers TV - roll your own!

This is one of those quiet but immensely effective combinations of technologies and you saw it here first. Go do it and happy streaming

Of course the next step will be that the modem will be built into the camera - chew on that for a bit and watch the future here…