Tinkering with USTREAM

Hello again edu-tech enthusiasts!

If you have not checked out the USTREAM website yet, I highly recommend sitting down with it for a while. From what I have learned while playing with the utility thus far, USTREAM is an online utility capable of broadcasting live video & audio from any compatible computer (basically, anything relatively new with a webcam) or mobile phone (a bit more limited to newer, higher-end smart phones). Once "broadcasters" create a live feed (or "show" in the USTREAM vernacular), additional viewers can "tune in" and converse about the live content via a USTREAM-hosted chat room, all occurring live, in real time. Furthermore, USTREAM records and archives live feeds for later viewing, as well as allows users to upload archived content to additional video hosting and social networking utlities such as YouTube and Facebook.

There are definitely some interesting possibilities here - students could create, broadcast, and / or view shows ranging across various topics, classes could be broadcasted live to absent or distance-based students, and the list goes on and on.

Bellow is my personal USTREAM feed embedded into this blog posting (did I mention that it is very, very easy to embed video, audio, and chat feeds in external sights?!?). I'm going to be tinkering with this utility quite a bit, so don't be surprised if you run into some live streaming randomness in the window bellow.

Online video chat by Ustream