Adding live video/audio streaming to your site - at zero cost

If you're blogging, or engaging in online activism and you want to take that next step - covering events with your cell phone camera or otherwise and steaming them live on your website, you should check out this solution:

http://www.mogulus.com/

It's free, the only catch is that they will periodically display small ad links at the bottom of your feed (I've been testing it for a while and trust me when I tell you that it's worth it). You go to their site, sign up for a channel name, and presto you have a video reflector. You can use their client (web based) but I prefer to use flash media encoder (also free, you just have to register - https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=fme25) since if you run dv it doesn't split the video and audio streams and their web client will only take audio input from your sound card which can cause feedback loops if you monitor audio.

You'll want to install the player widget on your web site, and depending on what you use for a cms (joomla, drupal, wordpress, etc.) you'll have to play with the input format because you'll need to be able to embed the js code unfiltered i.e. not using any html checking, etc.

I think I was pretty much up and running in about a half day and that was mostly because I had a few brain lapses around local encoding (user error).

I've tested using my laptop using my blackberry as a modem and on the verizon evdo network the video and audio are completely acceptable. If you get into 1x coverage or somesuch all bets are off though :(

So there you have it - unplugged live webcasting at it's finest, and completely free - feel free to hit me with any questions, etc. - twitter.com/usrbinperl or usrbinperl@yahoo.com