Jon Udell has a nifty piece on Mobile Webcasting. In addition to all the ‘how to do it’ technicalities regarding QuickTime, Helix, etc, Jon speculates on some neat use-cases (but read on for what he’s missed):

Here’s the payoff: bloggers will democratize video reporting of the live event in the same way they’ve already leveled the playing field for conventional reporting. The TV networks will still score most of the big interviews, but the collective eyes and ears of the videobloggers will supply a wealth of otherwise missing viewpoints. And their archived videoblog posts will be stirred in to the blogosphere’s bubbling cauldron of links, commentary, and aggregation.

This is cool, and it may seem hard to believe but I watched a live streaming video of a protest march taking place in New York City, from my home in the UK, via CU-SeeMe in 1994 (!!), shot from some random guy’s apartment window overlooking the protest route. I got really excited about the future possibilities for “People’s News”, but of course the technology was somewhat restrictive back then. But even mobile streaming was possible, and to win a friendly bet, while nursing a broken jaw in April 1995, I sent out some live video (again using CU-SeeMe, in a klunky Windows incarnation) from my Toshiba Windows 3.1 laptop connect to an early model mobile phone that communicated at 9.6Kbps!

Damn, I wish I’d recorded it… but we did make some related recordings around that time… maybe I’ll post some samples over the next few weeks just for posterity… if you want to get a feel for the fledgling 1994 technology we deployed including CU-SeeMe, NCSA Mosaic 1.0.3 for Macintosh (heh, Netscape didn’t yet exist), check out the technology 1-pager describing our 1994 Virtual Summer School.

But I digress… what inspired me to write this entry was the thought that Jon may have missed a trick. I know that live events (hence live streams) are way more exciting than pre-recorded, hence our obsession with live webcasts for the past 10 years. However, consider all the fuss lately about combining rich media with RSS feeds, to yield Podcasting and, more generically, Broadsnatching. That is the niche where videoblog-news-gathering is going to achieve it’s greatest impact, no?

[UPDATE: Jon is, of course, well up on the asynchronous side too, and added (by email) "In the scenario I painted where bloggers are streaming live from their mobile cams, enhancing the live experience, they are also spooling their streams to disk for timeshifted playback, aggregation, and commentary.". See Jon's further blog entry on the subject.]

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