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March 25, 2008

Live from the Salt Lick: BBQ and the Future of Mobcasting

I'm back in Austin, TX for a couple of days of NPR meetings, so last night I convinced my colleagues to make the 45-minute trek outside of the city to the Salt Lick, an old-time barbecue joint with some of the best BBQ in the area. While we waited for our table, I thought it would be a great occasion to break in my new Nokia N95 video phone. Using the streaming service Qik.com, I was able to stream a live video as I toured the barbecue pit, watching cooks slapping briskets onto the fire and slathering them with their tangy sauce. (I also managed to let the video keep recording after I thought I hit the stop button, so the end of the video is kinda funny.) This video is an archive of the live event.

As far as I'm concerned, being able to stream live video from a mobile phone to the Internet is an absolute game-changer. I'm hoping I can get some of these phones into the hands of NPR colleagues so they can test them out in the field, but imagine the possibilities when everyday people can press a button on their phones and start broadcasting. I keep thinking of the Tibetan protests that took place against the Chinese government, or the Burmese monk protests last year. In both cases, there was a limited pool of video available, and much of it came up after the fact. Imagine if a protestor - or a whole group of them - were able to broadcast what was going on around them in real time?

It's very much an extension of the mobcasting concept I advocated three years ago. Back then, I talked about using open source tools to allow protestors and citizen journalists to post audio and video to blogs and RSS feeds as events unfolded:

[W]ith the proliferation of video-enabled smartphones, it seems that it would be a natural progression to mobilize the millions of people who are buying these tools with an easy, no-nonsense way to capture socially-relevant footage and get it online in near-real time....

...A quick example: imagine a large protest at a political convention. During the protest, police overstep their authority and begin abusing protesters, sometimes brutally. A few journalists are covering the event, but not live. For the protestors and civil rights activists caught in the melee, the police abuses clearly need to be documented and publicized as quickly as possible. Rather than waiting for the handful of journalists to file a story on it, activists at the protest capture the event on their video phones -- dozens of phones from dozens of angles. Thanks to the local 3G (or community wi-fi) network, the activists immediately podcast the footage on their blogs. The footage gets aggregated on a civil rights website thanks to the RSS feeds produced by the podcasters' blogs. (Or perhaps they all podcast their footage directly to a centralized website, a la OneWorld TV but with an RSS twist.) This leads to coverage by bloggers throughout the blogosphere, which leads to coverage by the mainstream media, which leads to demands of accountability by the general public. That's mobcasting.

Back then, though, we were limited to somewhat crude mobile podcasting tools like Audlink.com and Audioblogger.com, both of which are now defunct. Today, we're seeing the deployment of new services that allow for near-real time audio and video posting, like Utterz and Kyte.tv. These services also incorporate social networking features that allow users to track each other's content, comment on it, and cross-post it to various social media sites, like Twitter or Facebook. And now with Qik, near-real time becomes actual real-time. Rather than waiting for you to finish recording your content before posting it from your phone, Qik streams it with just a 5-10 second delay. That's not so different than the delay you see in "live" broadcasts on TV news or radio.

In some ways, the term mobcasting is more appropriate than ever: groups of people using mobile phones in coordinated actions to cover an event without any easy way to censor them. It's both exhilarating and intimidating at the same time. It's just a matter of time before there's another government crackdown, police beating incident, voter intimidation or other incident that authorities wouldn't want the rest of us to see. But we will see it. Live. -andy

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Posted by acarvin at March 25, 2008 10:19 AM

Listen to this article Listen to a computer-generated podcast of this article