| I noticed that while there was an interest in a live video from tomorrow night's MassGOP chairman's debate (Facebook event link here.)
I have forgotten to tell people there is a way to broadcast stuff live and for free! (I just posted these instructions to Sandi Martinez and to Rob Eno so that maybe this can happen for tomorrow.)
If you have a laptop, a camera that can connect to it, a YouTube/Google+ account, you can broadcast your event free to the world with a feature called "Google Hangout". (Google link to that here.)
Here is how:
1. Make sure you have a Google+ account, and that it is linked to YouTube. (If you aren't sure about YouTube, don't worry, as starting your Hangout will get you to do this.)
2. Make sure your camera can talk to your laptop if you haven't tried that.
3. Start a hangout in Google. You can invite up to ten people, but that isn't really what we want to do here.
4. Check the "Hangouts on Air" box.
5. Start the Broadcast. Click the "Embed" button up top. It will have the code to link to YouTube and HTML for embedding. That's right - people can watch your event streaming on YouTube live!!!! That will be the best option for lots of people.
6. But, in the case of sites like RMG, get the HTML iframe embed html. This will work - I just tried the embeddding. Your RMG post will have a YouTube player with a play button where people can press play and watch it.
7. And, to top it all off, your video will be saved to YouTube automatically. Wow.
So.... give this a try with your laptop and little embedded camera. Once you've got the hang of it, you will turn to this often.
p.s. Of course, the quality of lighting and sound and camera work will be a big part of this working. Getting close up shots and having a decent microphone will be required for this to be effective. Experiment! :-) |
