Live! From upstairs! It’s blog TV live!
: So the webcast from my den to MSNBC came off tonight. Trey Jackson put it up online (though, of course, MSNBC should do that).
Who needs a multimillion-dollar studio? What you see above is the blogcast studio: A Logitech laptop camera atop my screen; the screen atop a box to get it to eye-level; notes for the spiels taped to the screen; MSM Messenger to show the video; a phone to get the audio back; a very long ethernet cable to get to the router so we didn’t rely on wireless; lots of lamps … et voila: TV.
I was upstairs in the den broadcasting; the family was down in the family room, ridiculing. “It looked like you were lipsyncing,” said my daughter. I tried to explain frame rates and backhaul but gave up and confessed that, indeed, Daddy is Milli Vanilli (which is better than being Ashlee Simpson).
This was supposed to be used for segments about blogging but, at the last minute, they canceled the entire show — just as Bob Cox caught a train to New York — and switched to Popevision. I had no time to find links but managed to survive three segments. And the topic didn’t exactly fit with bloggy geeky fun. But as soon as I got off, the morning bookers called to do the same thing then. That’s the wonder of TV: It is the medium made of memes.
What’s neat about this is that anybody can broadcast from anywhere. Sure, the quality of the image is still iffy (but it’s better than an Ollie North satphone call). But the possibilities are endless.
