I worked as a director on (don't shoot me) Big Brother TV show. We had numerous live feeds (40+) with capability of recording only two channels which consisted of two cameras each at the time. It was of premium importance to me, as a director, to choose which streams we would record. When I delegated to my switchers which cameras and persons should be on streams I would bounce myself between other "stories" developing in the house.
How is this relevant to justin.tv? Live television/streaming would be impossible for me to do without a 'tool' I had, which was loggers. Loggers were basically two persons, one delegated to each stream that would vaguely transcribe what was happening on the stream via simple logging software.
Logger would watch two cameras (master plan and close ups that were chosen by me and operated by switcher and remote camera operator, or cameraman behind mirrors) from the stream and listen to it and then would hit Alt-m in a textarea sort of control to enter current SMTP timestamp and start writing what was going on or transcribing a dialog.
I think this kind of primitive, yet powerful feature for logging what is going on can be of use for justin.tv in more ways then one - lectures, spiders could crawl through text, one could skim through a transcription and have SMTP links into the prerecorded video.
Of course, not every video will have willing logger to do so - but premium content would most probably have. Look at avid pirates transcribing subtitles for pirated movies and stuff. I can only imagine someone transcribing a webcast lecture, or a company sponsored live event being transcribed.
just my 2c.
edit:
Now that I think about it - justin.tv could be ideal platform for casting. Private one to one sessions with casting apprentices or even director should not be a problem with remote cam, since casting is usually one person with lame camera and one person in front of that camera acting out directions from the person behind camera or making poses, headshots and stuff like that. You could have an option to make it somewhat open, so people can vote who they like most and stuff like that. This is more of a product idea than API/tool. I have much more, I'll stop now since this was not a question. But, you smart guys here - someone should build something like this on top of justin.tv (or them themselves) and offer someone like shots.net a percentage for marketing.
The real problem here is always latency. Even if you're not doing Onlive-style stuff, videoconferencing is hard. I doubt the standard Flash toolchain (webcam + Flash + etc) can do it all with acceptable latency. Current Justin.TV only works IMO because you're communicating via chat in one direction and via video in the other; a real two-way communication link gets really awkward even at 500ms latency. When people do videoconferencing, they expect it to be like their cell phone, not like a call to the moon.
We at x264 have been working on this for some time for... a certain company that wishes to stay anonymous. Right now you can get down to about 9 millisecond total end-to-end latency for 800x600 video (not counting client and network latency, just server-side), which works pretty damn well.
But dropping encoder latency isn't enough; you need to have a system built around it that has tolerable latency. VLC, for example, doesn't; it's not made for two-way communication, and so it has a 5-15 second internal buffer. It ends up requiring a lot of custom-rolled toolchains, even if the basic libraries already do what is necessary.
I think you underestimate the difficulty of getting low latency video connections.
For example, Flash by default buffers at least 8 frames for decoding. This means you instantly have 1/3 of a second of latency for a 24fps stream.* Most live-streaming encoders use a VBV buffer size of about 1-2 seconds--very few are even designed to go below about half a second.
When you need to go low latency, every millisecond adds up, and it becomes painful fast.
*There is a (very ugly) hack to somewhat reduce this. I don't think I'm allowed to talk about it due to my current contractual obligations, but if you're experienced in video streaming, perhaps you can figure it out.
EDIT: I agree, it's possible, but JTV might have to modify their internals to make it possible.
These would be the things that we would absolutely also want on JamLegend. Being able to see how you are doing both in the game and seeing your friends real movements are key to the future of internet gaming.
These are from a list we made over the summer while getting ready to launch our API. Now that the RFS is official, it seemed like a good time to share them with everyone and solicit some more ideas.
The one about "real video games" is extremely interesting (and enticing). However, most of the game ideas I have now are set in AUs or require supernatural abilities. I'm going to think about a good game idea for this kind of gameplay.
Perhaps something like Augmented Reality games using the video feed from your opponent??? Imagine your character having to parkour through your opponents living room...
The hardware broadcaster was my suggestion. It should be dead-simple, with inputs for video, power, and ethernet - configurable through a web interface, just like a router.
If you can make it cheap enough (< $100 would be my guess), we have a lot of gamers who I believe would buy one. You wouldn't have to write much software - for example vlc can already stream to jtv.
The real problem with ASIC solutions is that they generally have terrible compression; you usually don't get good results until you get up to the range of tens of thousands of dollars (for real broadcast encoders). Combined with the utter lack of upload bandwidth that most users have, this could become a serious problem.
The best option I could see in the near future is ARM's recently-announced 2Ghz quad-core CPU; it's low-power enough and hopefully cheap enough to stick in a small box but fast enough to run a good encoder at a good resolution. But even that would probably put the cost well above $100, at which point you might as well start selling capture cards and using peoples' CPUs instead.
Wonder if it'd be possible to do this in software - much like the cheat code type cheat systems that you load up, it could just load up the streaming software.
Might take longer to get working, but would end up easier sell/cheaper.
Keep in mind as you brainstorm that there are additional API's coming out, including a pay-per-view API, subscriptions, etc. Also integrated ad networks if desired. Monetization shouldn't be a big problem moving forward. I'm sure there are some brilliant ideas waiting to be discovered involving PPV...
How is this relevant to justin.tv? Live television/streaming would be impossible for me to do without a 'tool' I had, which was loggers. Loggers were basically two persons, one delegated to each stream that would vaguely transcribe what was happening on the stream via simple logging software.
Logger would watch two cameras (master plan and close ups that were chosen by me and operated by switcher and remote camera operator, or cameraman behind mirrors) from the stream and listen to it and then would hit Alt-m in a textarea sort of control to enter current SMTP timestamp and start writing what was going on or transcribing a dialog.
I think this kind of primitive, yet powerful feature for logging what is going on can be of use for justin.tv in more ways then one - lectures, spiders could crawl through text, one could skim through a transcription and have SMTP links into the prerecorded video.
Of course, not every video will have willing logger to do so - but premium content would most probably have. Look at avid pirates transcribing subtitles for pirated movies and stuff. I can only imagine someone transcribing a webcast lecture, or a company sponsored live event being transcribed.
just my 2c.
edit: Now that I think about it - justin.tv could be ideal platform for casting. Private one to one sessions with casting apprentices or even director should not be a problem with remote cam, since casting is usually one person with lame camera and one person in front of that camera acting out directions from the person behind camera or making poses, headshots and stuff like that. You could have an option to make it somewhat open, so people can vote who they like most and stuff like that. This is more of a product idea than API/tool. I have much more, I'll stop now since this was not a question. But, you smart guys here - someone should build something like this on top of justin.tv (or them themselves) and offer someone like shots.net a percentage for marketing.