A new initiative has been launched by Livestation, the destination for live TV online designed to help large-scale charity appeals to broadcast their calls for donations to a global audience during times of crisis and emergency. The channel will feature a line up of the current crisis appeals and will be available free of charge to all major charity organisations when required. The aim is to increase the visibility of charity appeals as much as possible through the use of Livestation’s broadcast technology over broadband.
The first appeal being screened is by the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) for aid for those who have been injured and lost their homes in Gaza.
According to the DEC, thousands are now struggling to survive with limited food, fresh drinking water and medicines.
The call for help, which is now running a the new Live Appeals channel on Livestation, is asking for donations of £25 for warm blankets or £50 for a food parcel, which DEC says will last a family for a month.
You can find more about the Gaza appeal by visiting the DEC site and you can watch the Live Appeal channel now, on Livestation, by going to our new appeals channel.
Charities are invited to approach Livestation to use this facility, which will be offered free-of-charge as part of Livestation’s contribution to the cause being promoted.
Next Tuesday, the eyes of the United States – and likely the world – will be on Washington, DC, as Barack Obama takes the oath of office to become the 44th President of the United States. Attendance is likely to dwarf any presidential inauguration in history – with estimates currentlypredicting at least one million people at the event. Regardless of the attendance, one thing is for sure: with nearly ubiquitous access to cameras and video equipment, this will be the most well-documented inauguration, ever. Now, the Microsoft Photosynth team has announced that they will be making the event even more memorable – by creating a three-dimensional “synth” of the inauguration from your photos.
Photosynth – a service powered by Seadragon – allows a series of two-dimensional pictures to be stitched and interpolated into a three-dimensional representation of a moment in time. The more angles and photos, the more complete the rendering. So, the girth of photos from the inauguration will be particularly well-suited, given that there will be millions of images from thousands of different vantage points.
The Photosynth project is being run in conjunction with CNN.com as part of their “The Moment” sub-site.
“We’ll take your photos from every angle, combine them with CNN’s professional shots, and produce what we hope will be an amazing experience that will be shown live on CNN. And you thought the Jessica Yellin hologram was cool! The synth will also be available for everyone to see on CNN.com.”
To participate:
1. Take one photo of the moment when Obama takes the oath. If you have a digital camera with a zoom lens, take three photos (wide-angle, mid-zoom, full-zoom)
2. E-mail each photo as soon as possible to themoment@cnn.com (one photo per message, 10MB size limit). Don’t forget to include your name in the message if you’d like to appear in the list of the contributors. Please only send in photos you took yourself.
3. Go to cnn.com/themoment to see all of the photos in our photosynth
The good news? Anyone with a digital camera can participate and take part in recording history. In addition to the Photosynth project, all of the photos will also be shared via iReport. Then, there’s the bad news. If you want to see the finished work in all its glory, you have to have access to a Windows machine. Photosynth is only fully supported support Vista and XP currently. But they do offer an experimental Silverlight-based Photosynth player for other platforms. (I used the experimental viewer and it worked very well.)
If you’re planning to be in attendance at the inauguration, bring your camera. Otherwise, stay tuned to CNN.com The Moment and Photosynth for the results of this experiment.
Source: readwriteweb
Al Jazeera’s senior Washington correspondent, Rob Reynolds, will again be hosting a live chat with Livestation viewers, this time about the inauguration of Barack Obama.
The last time Rob engaged in real time chat with Al Jazeera viewers was in the run up to the election, which saw Obama beat McCain. A lot has happened since then, and Rob will be online in the Al Jazeera English chat room in the Livestation player from 21:00 GMT on Thursday 15 January to discuss those developments.
Livestation viewers will get the chance to ask one of the most informed journalists about their hopes for the Obama presidency, the legacy of George Bush, the role of the US in the world, and the current crisis in Gaza.
As Rob will only be able to answer a handful of questions in the hour, viewers have been asked to think through questions in advance and to use the ’set alias’ tab in the Livestation player chat panel to set their name and location – anonymous comments are less likely to be answered.
The latest version of the Livestation player is available on the Livestation website. Rob and his producers will be there waiting for any viewers who want to take part at 21:00 GMT on Thursday 15 January.
US Presidential Inauguration
The inauguration of Barack Obama and his move to the White House is set to be one of the biggest political spectacles the US has seen in years. Find out more about the coverage provided by Livestation’s partner channels
As reported by Matteo Berlucchi, Livestation has been forced to do an heart breaking decision. The recent war in Gaza has increased Livestation usage so much that it became essential that Livestation reduce the quality of it’s video to limit bandwidth consumption/cost.
The service was originally advertised as peer-2-peer but in actuallity the service is provided solely from corporate internet video access. The peer-2-peer functionality is not yet present in the client software.
Given that Joost moved away from it’s peer-2-peer solution it is hard to beleive that Livestation will get there successfully any time soon. It is much easier to provide the video streams from a controlled access and ensure acceptable user experience. With peer-2-peer it is much more difficult to offer realtime video streaming in a consistant manner due to the uncontroled nature of each participants internet connection.
Hopefully Livestation will get enough funding from advertisement to remain viable in the long run. It would be sad to see such a great service close due to it’s own success and lack of viable business model.
You will find below a copy of the original post:
Dear Livestation viewers,
in the past 2 weeks we have experienced an enormous growth in traffic because of the dramatic situation in Gaza. With a lot of people turning to the internet to find more information about the war, our traffic has consequently grown a lot and very quickly.
As the service is free and we still don’t make much money with advertising (we are 4 months old and if you like to advertise or sponsor a channel please do get in touch team@livestation.com) we had to slightly reduce the streaming quality. The change is visible but the watching and listening experience should be pretty much the same as it was before.
We apologise for this unplanned quality reduction but our aim is to make sure the highest possible number of people can access our partner channels from anywhere and at anytime.
Please do send us your feedback, tell your friends and keep watching.
boxee’s private alpha went well beyond expectations. over 200,000 people signed up.. today boxee is opening their alpha to all Mac, Ubuntu and Apple TV users. Windows is also moving into private-alpha (which means you still need to get invited, but boxee is going to release thousands of invites every week). bear with them as they scale…)
new applications in this release:
- BBC iPlayer (UK users only) – boxee could not ignore the calls from London-based users for proper iPlayer support. it is a huge success in the UK (bigger than Hulu in the US), and it provides access to a huge selection of tv shows and radio in great quality. too bad it is only accessible from the UK.. BBC-if you want worldwide viewers, boxee is waiting here with open arms!
- Joost – in the survey of video applications people wanted to see on boxee, Joost was #1 (iPlayer was #2..). Joost has a great content library with TV shows, web videos, music videos and movies. you can browse the different channels and search through the entire Joost library.
- MTV Music – when MTV Music launched a couple months ago it got great reviews from users. it is a perfect service for the TV. they started by letting users play music videos from artists they come across on boxee. now you can go into the MTV app and conduct searches by Artist/Song or just browse.
bug fixes & enhancements in this latest release:
- dual screen support
- Netflix streaming improvements
- Search in Hulu
- ffwd, rewind, pause in Comedy Central
- improved mouse support
- 3 digits episode numbers recognized
- giving folder.jpg its proper priority
- updates to SMB library
- updates to video and audio playback libraries
- updates to Flash player
boxee also created developer.boxee.tv, which provides basic guidelines for developers who want to build apps to run on boxee. this will continue to grow over the next few months based on users requests. an early example of using the boxee API is work done by Orange Labs (from the France Telecom group) who created a boxee application for their photo sharing service Pikeo.
As I wrote in a previous post I bought a very nice and cheap Dell Mini 9 netbook with the intention of converting it to an Apple Netbook.
The website http://mydellmini.com provided all the instructions required to install a functional OS X 10.5.6 based netbook… but not everything was perfect.
I started following and contributing in the forum and no more than a week later I now sit in my couch writing this post on my 100% functional Dell Mini 9 based Apple Netbook.
I can now put the netbook to sleep by closing the lid. It will then wakeup nicely with proper sound and mute fully working.
I can store tons of applications on my class 4 16GB SDHC card and keep using them after sleeping the netbook.
Wireless is fully functional and I can even tether my Apple netbook to my iPhone via the now defunct NullRiver Netshare.
I can connect my netbook to an external monitor and enjoy either mirror or dual screen.
I can connect to the network via cabled ethernet.
I can connect to a remote DVD shared from my other Macs or PC.
Name it, this netbook can do it.
Now if only Apple could come up with a sexier/tinner/lighter version with built in touchscreen and I will switch. Until then i will keep enjoying my Dell based netbook.
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