Webcasting

Webcasting concerns the distribution of audiovisual material over the internet.

An overview of webcasting developments (June 2005)

http://blog.commonbits.org/2005/06/be_the_media_th.html?

Tools and services that enable Webcasting

The better known civil society initiatives are Common Bits (http://www.commonbits.org ) and the Broadcast Machine (http://www.particpatoryculture.org/bm ). They are associated with sites that enable sharing of such material through online communities, such as Common Tunes (http://www.commontunes.org ) for music and CommonFlix (http://www.commonflix.org ) for videos. Vimeo (http://www.vimeo.com/ ) allows users to share small clips.

Many new sites are also acting as repositories such as Our Media (http://www.ourmedia.org ), the Archive (http://www.archive.org ) or the Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page)

One World TV is at http://tv.oneworld.net . Alternative TV stations are build around such open source content. For example UK Nova (http://www.uknova.com ) is webcasting BBC programs which have been put in the public domain. Movies for the masses is a peer to peer financing scheme for producing movies and videos, at http://www.moviesforthemasses.ibiny.com/ . Search engines have been developed to identify this kind of content, see http://video.google.com/ and http://www.omn.org/

In the corporate world, examples are Audiolink (http://www.audiolink.com/home.html ) and ODEO (http://www.odeo.com ) which assist users in their broadcasting efforts. Prodigem (http://www.prodigem.com ) allows any audiovisual creator to sell their content. Current TV (http://www.current.tv) is a similar attempt to commercialise citizen webcasting.

Companies are building software that allows users to manage time-shifted radio and television, as well as self-created content into their playing devices such as iPods. Griffin Technologies recently announced iFill, while El Gato's (http://www.elgato.com ) EveHome software enables viewers to watch internet-downloaded content on their TV.

A videoproduction suite is discussed at = http://journal.planetwork.net/article.php?lab=pantic0704

Most of the above material was reviewed at http://blog.commonbits.org/2005/06/be_the_media_th.html?