[occupyaustin-it] occupyaustin-it Digest, Vol 2, Issue 105

[Joe Cooper]

From: Nolan Darilek <nolan at thewordnerd.info>
>
> FWIW, I have an interesting perspective on this. Every occupation I've
> seen thus far is using Ustream or Livestream for their broadcasts. While
> this is a sensible choice, and I don't fault them for making it, the
> reality is that these platforms use Flash and are by and large
> inaccessible. Adobe has made token commitments to accessibility, but
> these have only manifested on Windows and OS X, and only if Flash
> developers take advantage of them. Their is nothing available for
> Android, and indeed Adobe has pulled out of the mobile Flash space to
> back HTML 5 technologies. So I have a personal interest in advising
> these broadcast networks to adopt open standards such as HTML 5, and in
> building technologies to help support this (there are codec wars, of
> course, so there need to be custom-built or off-the-opensource-shelf
> technologies to dynamically transcode to MP3 for almost everything,
> Vorbis/Theora for Firefox, etc.) And I'd love to see other occupations
> adopt these, because I'd like to see what's going on in NYC or LA
> without effectively being blocked out of some aspects of the interface.
> So that's me, and for my part I'm thrilled to see folks building stuff
> like this for *everyone* to use. And I don't get what's so terrible
> about that.
>

I'm a big fan of open standards, and I agree that HTML5 video is the way
forward. But Flash video does play on Android devices. Livestream doesn't
seem to work right on Android, but most Flash videos work fine there.

YouTube has an experimental HTML5 video player, that you can opt into:
http://www.youtube.com/html5

Live streaming from the client side via HTML 5 does not seem to have any
standards support, yet, so something like Livestream or Justin.TV or
Ustream would, I guess, need to transcode from whatever the Flash recording
client is sending out to standards-based HTML5 video. I may be wrong on
this, but I think they're waiting for the new video standard to catch up. I
doubt a small team of volunteers (or a couple of employees of a non-profit,
if that's what folks are envisioning) could actually develop an open
standards based alternative to Livestream/Ustream/Justin.TV in anything
resembling a reasonable time schedule.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://foojutsu.org/pipermail/occupyaustin-it/attachments/20111129/277d7f07/attachment.html>