The other day I was browsing other Gannett sites, just to see how they do things in comparison to the Register, and, on the indystar.com, I saw a link to a live video stream using a service called mogulus. Seemed interesting, like the ustream service that Kyle Hansen used on the Spartan Daily’s site, it can be embedded into stories or the front page. Apparently some of the online people at the Register have also been playing around with mogulus. I will have to talk to Kyle and get his opinion on how smoothly ustream is.
The same stream was also running on the jconline site, in their rotating carousel of top stories which is identical to ours.
I saw a demo of Mogulus last fall. The most attractive piece of it to me was a ticker that ran across the screen with headlines + links powered by an RSS feed. A news site could run live video with Mogulus and a live news ticker with links to recent headlines. Gotta love that.
I was really happy with ustream the first time we used it. The few little problems we had were completely operator error since I had not spent that much time with it. However, we tried to use it again last week and for some reason, ustream did not recognize the camera I was using. It was a different camera than the first time, and I have not had the time to figure out exactly what went wrong. We are going to try it again. I will have to look into Mogulus and maybe try it as well.
Hey Daniel-
I’m at the News & Observer in Raleigh and have just started using mogulus. I had been playing around with it and was really impressed, so we ran our first live shot from an Obama rally last week. Super cool super easy… had about 300 people tuned in watching.
Mogulus is surprisingly full featured with a free product (IndyStar and the other Gannett papers have sprung for a higher-bandwidth premium version). You can run a preprogrammed loop of previous material, as Ryan said you can run a ticker that can pull from an RSS feed. You can even have several cameras set up and switch live between them. We might try out a multi-cam shoot in the coming weeks.
The caveat is that you need a strong connection. We almost pulled the Obama feed because we couldn’t make it work with the existing wifi or a broadband card. Fortunately, a network I assume was for the travelling media magically appeared 20 minutes before the start and we were able to go live. So, unless you’re sure of how good a connection you’ll have, be careful what you promise.
Highly recommended though.