tv – Talk Unafraid

So, having moved on from my work at Insanity Radio attempting to build a professional-quality radio station, I’m now going into building a professional quality TV station from the ground up.

Trouble is, there is literally no budget (yet, at least), but we wanted to cover events during the Fresher’s Week here at Royal Holloway. So, I spent a week putting together our own YouTube+UStream. This turned out to be surprisingly complex purely in terms of lack of good contiguous information and documentation. Once the parts are all together, it’s actually remarkably simple.

First, let’s examine the goals of the station. From there, we can work out what we need to have in order to achieve this. Continue reading TV on a budget – rolling your own RTMP

I’ve done a lot of blogging on radio and Rivendell in particular. I’m a huge proponent of open tools and technologies wherever possible because it provides tons of flexibility, is cheap, and in many cases is just as powerful or easy to use as the commercial stuff. Radio and audio is complex, but why stop there? At Insanity we’ve been evaluating video streaming as a way of adding to our existing broadcasts and coverage, as video can be far more engaging to consumers than audio, particularly in the YouTube era. But with Insanity, we have one major problem: We don’t have any money!

So, you might figure that’s a problem. You’d be, partly, right. Video involves a lot more data, loads more numbers to crunch as a result, more bandwidth, and so on. Not to mention the relevant methods of capture are immensely more expensive to implement than the equivalent-quality audio. I’d like, though, to highlight a few nice things for open source video and production. Continue reading Next steps: Video streaming and production