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Reasonably Accurate 馃馃 Transcript
Morning. How's everyone doing today? It is Friday, end of the week, um, starting to get a little bit of spring weather here. Hopefully you're getting some nice weather where you are. Um It can end the week on a positive note. Um, you know, who's not ending the week?
On a positive note is Facebook. What a train wreck dumpster fire combo. I don't even know and I don't really want to talk about Facebook today even though they are all over the news scrambling, trying to recover from this uh Cambridge Analytica scam that sort of pulled away the layers so that you understand their business model and the motivators.
But I will say this, I read a really great um op ed by Tim Wu and he published it in the New York Times. And essentially it was, you know, look at the, um, it was calling out um the business model and look at how the business model drive results, uh drives results and I know running um a page on Facebook, you definitely see that where it's a constant push to boost things to advertise on the platform.
And of course, if you're spending money to advertise on the platform and boost your um your page, your, your content, you're gonna want to see results. Um So it's sort of that feedback loop um that really pushes things through, but I don't want to talk about that in depth.
Um What I do want to talk about is actually live streaming like we're doing now. Um I've been thinking about it a lot. Um As I said yesterday, I'm thinking about maybe pivoting the show a little bit to be more of sort of like a daily um round up of some issues to kind of up level some stuff to say like, hey, this happened, this happened, this happened, here's what it means in the bigger picture.
Um Not sure, still kind of playing around with that, but of course, you know, being a nerd, I kind of went towards the technology side and right now, um I switched from streaming to Facebook, just streaming to youtube. And most of the time I stream from my Mac.
Um If I'm not streaming from my Mac, I'm streaming from, I have a Mevo Pro camera which is a fantastic little mobile camera. Great on the go suite, not at all. Um You know, disappointed in the V two of that thing.
Uh It's great, but when I'm here on my Mac, I've got a bunch of different options. Now, normally I used to use a software suite called Wire Casts. It's set up for big time productions and because of that it's got a really clunky U I, it's, um, there's a lot of stuff going on.
Um, and then I, you know, there's an old alternative source alternative called Open Broadcast Studio, which is much, uh, it's a little bit simpler. Um, but it's not necessarily as stable. I've seen some, some issues with that and obviously, if you're live streaming, you don't want any stability issues.
So, what I ended up doing was actually using this tool from em um called uh ECM Live. Um Now ECM is just a little uh software shop. They make some funky stuff like um eyeglasses would help you modify your um webcam picture, like zoom in and zoom out and stuff like that.
But they make this tool um ECM Live and it's targeted at Facebook Live and that's what I was using to start with. Um But you can also send it to a standard RMT RT MP server which is a streaming server.
Um And that's what I'm doing right now. I'm using that on my Mac that's feeding this to youtube Live. Um And then youtube Live is REBROADCASTING on as, as required. Um The upside here is that the interface is perfect.
It's really set up to be delivering a show from one person really simply, really easily, but of course, there's some very Facebook specific features. Um But I can have a Skype call and pull that in. I can show you my desktop, I can do any number of things really, really simple and really cleanly.
It is really designed with the user, the streamer in mind. The problem is, is it can't go to Twitter. Um It can't go to Twitter because it's got very simple settings. Basically, I'm going uh in HD or I'm going in not HD and I can't configure um this particulars of the technical aspects of the stream and Twitter is very, very particular.
So, of course, I started looking out at all the other services. There's things like live stream, which is now part of Vimeo um cloud flare has something coming. Um You know, I can home brew my own. Um You know, the goal is to be able to use something simple on my desktop that lets me pull in all the different resources on my desktop like uh application windows like multiple.
Um you know, I'm using a separate right here. I'm using this guy. Can I almost get it there? I'm using my Yeti pro um for microphone. Um You know, I've got my uh Brio webcam. Um I can easily one key switch this to show you another webcam or another video source.
And there's lots of great flexibility here, but I want to be able to get this out to where the audience is. So whether that's youtube streaming, whether that's periscope, whether it's both at the same time, whether that's something completely different and it turns out.
It's harder than it looks. And this actually ties to something I was ranting about a bit on Twitter. Yesterday was I was trying to set up. The periscope has a button, uh, very much like a lot of the other Twitter buttons.
The periscope button has it where it will show, you know, market NC A but then it will flip to red and go live when I'm actually on air. Um, so that people, wherever that button is, you can see that I'm active and going.
The problem is that button is 100 and 25 K in size, doesn't sound like a lot except when you realize that a full page article on my website weighs in at about 25 K. So it's a five X increase to get this one button that just says live.
So, um and that kind of ties to the streaming platforms as well. There's a bunch of other things that you can do and some ready made platforms that you can use. Um But they are weighty or they to do a certain thing.
Um They're not as slick as I want. I'd like just like a purpose workflow. Um So I'm going to dig into that today a bit. Maybe there's something I could pull together with some of the great um ad R services or maybe something on the Google platform.
I'm not sure. Maybe I just need to get unrealistic expectations out of my head. But it's a fun little project uh, for, uh Friday, got a bunch of articles that I'm trying to finish off and trying to write and get those out.
Um, but in between, if I hit a bit of writer's block, I think we're going to dive into this because I think it's interesting. I think live stream is really effective. Um, it ties to this bigger thought about what I want to do with this show.
Um And I think there's a lot of possibilities here. It's an exciting technology, it's exciting um concept, you know, where I can just hit a button and start broadcasting live um to any number of people which is amazing. Um So most of these streaming services are set up by default to go from my phone, right?
I click a button on periscope and I'm live, which is great if it's just me and broadcasting out, but if I want to pull in other content, um or if I want a little higher production value, like using some lights and using some uh additional microphones that gets to be a lot harder.
So um just random, totally random Friday thought apparently. Um So I guess this is, you know, Mornings with Mark a random episode, uh You guys are set up for a great day as always hit me up online at marknca in the comments down below.
Um Happy to chat, always looking to engage and discuss because I think that's how ideas go forward. If I missed something on the stream in front, let me know because you could save me some time today. Um Other than that, I hope you guys have a Great Friday and a great weekend and I will talk to you on Monday.
