As the internet continues to democratize everything it touches, I present to you my experiences with DIY video broadcasting.
Working as a Creative at Etiket provides some opportunities to deploy technology in innovative ways. As part of a campaign that we are running for The Bang Bang Club film, we were given an interview slot with some of the cast and crew from the film and I came up with the idea to livestream our interview questions from my iPhone. Indigenous Film Distribution approved the concept and we conducted a few proof of concept tests.
After checking out apps by Justin.tv, Ustream and Streamago, I decided to go with the TwitCasting Live service for this exercise. TwitCasting provides a quick way to get the URL out to Twitter and offers real-time stats on how the broadcast is performing. Since we would be shooting on location and we were unsure of what facilities were available, this meant that we faced the possibility of broadcasting over 3G.
Tests over the office’s network provided a mixed bag of results – the frame rate was low and viewing of the feed revealed that the audio had a tendency of coming out of sync. We switched to 3G for both broadcasting and viewing, and I made my way outside the office building. Immediately I noticed that the frame rate was solid at around 10fps (up from the 1 – 3 fps that we got on the flaky office DSL line). Through a combination of hand signals and verbal commands, I saw that the audio was syncing nicely. The test was successful.
On the day of the junket we headed out to Fourways Mall a few hours early to scope out the location and to do on-site tests for the broadcast. I tested the broadcast directly through my iPhone’s 3G Vodacom connection. The results were not promising. I was averaging 1,5fps. I walked through a couple of locations in the mall and there was little change even in the open areas. I tethered my iPhone to the Huawei U8100 (RBM C) that I had brought along. At least in Fourways Red Bull Mobile seemed to perform marginally better, averaging a frame rate of 4fps. Indigenous was feeding the talent at the restaurant next-door to the theatre. This restaurant happened to offer WiFi access to customers. YES! Here was a possible way around the terrible performance I’d experience thus far.
Unfortunately, the iPhone started spitting out errors when I tried to log onto the restaurant’s WiFi access point. One of my directors had his iPad there. Great, so I jumped on the WiFi network, downloaded the app and started streaming. At exactly the same frame rate as my RBM connection. Okay, that’s not ideal. And the complementary option for this network only provided us with 15 minutes of access before kicking us out to a pay wall. We didn’t know how long we’d be busy. I made the decision to switch back to RBM.
I fired-up Tricorder, checked for the highest reception area and placed the phone there. We arranged the set, set up the iPhone and prepared to receive the interviewees. Director Steven Silver, actors Frank Rautenbach and Neels van Jaarsveld, and legendary photographer Alf Khumalo joined us on site. We got some excellent answers to some good questions and the interaction between the interviewees was very entertaining.
The Bang Bang Club was the name given to four young photographers: Greg Marinovich, Kevin Carter, Ken Oosterbroek and Joao Silva, whose photographs captured the final bloody days of white rule in South Africa. The film tells the remarkable and sometimes harrowing story of these young men ““ and the extraordinary extremes they went to in order to capture their pictures. Robin is their photo-editor, who looked out for them, protected them and made sure their photographs were seen across the world. The movie opens 22 July nationwide.
