The Place of James Pain

Let’s not debate how great the internet is, because it’s pretty bloody fantastic. So fantastic that it’s gotten to the point where we can stream video, live.

There’s a problem though. Anyone with the internet and a webcam is able to do it. This has the side effect of alot of unprofessional and non interesting content on the providers websites.

This means that someone with a good idea and knowledge of how to make it viewer friendly gets lost in this mass of…crap (The word of the month it seems).

Because of this lack of dedication and workmanship on these live streams, the providers aren’t too keen on making the quality of the stream any better.

If someone does want a quality stream, HD lets say, then they would have to shell out alot of money for the ‘extra’ service.

The only useful purposes I can see a live stream being beneficial would be if;

1. Viewer participation is required
2. Live event taking place (time critical)
3. Rolling content (a 24 hour stream)

The first one is the most common for some ego growing reason. An example would be a (stereotype alert) goth, emo type person just answering questions in the live stream’s chat with heavy metal music playing in the background.

The second one is mainly made by big American TV networks who are marketing an event like the Oscars or a movie première. These usually get huge advertisements and publicity on the live streaming website. There is little reason why these can’t be recorded and published on a site like youTube though.
Another example of the second one is a live stream of a radio show taking place.

An obvious example for the third one is Big Brother, although that doesn’t get streamed on live streaming websites. A good example I saw not too long ago would be newly born puppies in what looked like a box, streaming for a month. This was quite a inspirational live stream as you can see day by day the progression of these cute puppies.

The reason I’m posting this is because a few months I had an idea for a live streaming weekly show to be hosted on one of these live streaming websites. Properly made, produced etc. The reason being is I wanted to harvest viewer participation and incorporate it into the show, something you can’t do on TV.

The idea started out to be a quiz format but observing the ability to be able to stream outside of studios using mobile networks, it could have the ability of going to time critical events. But this hasn’t been thought out yet.

The reason I haven’t done this was stated earlier. It would be hard to get noticed among all the other streams happening. Even though the internet is a fantastic marketing machine with twitter and facebook helping out in a big way, it may not get enough viewership for it to be worth making.

It may be worth making none the less.