Platforms for broadcasting- Ustream and TV

Ustream research

Ustream is an online platform that allows anyone with a camera to stream live on the Internet to an unlimited audience. The site has interactive features such as chat, polls, star ratings and comments. The range of content on Ustream is huge and includes videos of political events, talk shows, music and sports that can reach anyone with Internet access.

The basic Ustream is free to use and can be because of advertising. However, in early 2009, the creators of Ustream decided to offer a Watershed, a pay as you go version of the site. Users of this new feature don’t have to show Ustreams advertisements and logos.

Ustream is available to its users online or on their mobiles by downloading an application for their apple, android or Nokia phone. On these devices, consumers can broadcast and interact live similar to on the website.

As Ustream is free to use and simple to use it is the most straightforward way to broadcast our radio show. Even though Ustream is primarily used for it’s video feature, we can use this to our advantage by creating multi-platform content.

Other aspects of the site like chat, polls and star rating give us the opportunity to interact with our audience and receive live feedback. The comment section will allow us to gain our audiences response and opinions after the show has aired so that we can see how to improve our show if we ever did it again. This will help in our evaluations.

We can use the colleges already existing channels, Stratcast and Stratcastoff to air our shows.

Bibliography

http://www.ustream.tv/blog/2009/02/17/today-ustream-launches-watershed/

http://www.ustream.tv/mobile

Radio on the TV research

Radio is now available on your television by the means of digital TV.

You can receive freeview with or without subscription so this means that everyone can potentially listen to radio by the use of this method and get the extra features by just a one-off payment for a set top box. By 2012 the UK will be completely digital which means that everyone can access radio via their TV’s. An extra feature of this method is that you can access additional content by pressing the red button on your remotes.

Other ways of listening to the radio via TV are by satellite and cable.

As the majority of people in the UK have digital TV nowadays it is easier to create a TV channel that reaches them. However, this is a lengthy and expensive (£500,000) process that wouldn’t be suitable for our college.

Bibliography

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/listen/tv/

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Other Platforms

http://ostaffordmbp.blogspot.com/2010/10/different-ways-of-broadcasting-online.html

An advantage of internet radio is that you can listen to the majority of it wherever you are in the world even if you're the other side of where the radio station actually is. However some major radio networks limit listening access to their country due to music licensing and advertising issues.