Tag Archives | Webcams

TV Station in a Box

Posted by Robin Raskin on November 23, 2010 at 8:45 am

Last Gadget Standing Nominee: Jade Live Broadcaster

Price: $219

As the world turns to video it’s easy to be left behind, especially if you’re on a limited budget. MCN Technologies’ Jade Live Broadcaster levels the video playing field by offering a network camera for live video broadcasting over the Internet. It’s an HD camera with H264/AAC compression and an 802.11b/g wireless interface.  The live content is distributed as a set of streams with different resolutions simultaneously (1280-by-720, 640-by-480, 320-by-240 and 160-by-120) with bit rates ranging from  2Mbps to 80Kbps, so viewers with smartphones connected to mobile broadband can view low bit rate streams while ones with HD players connected to high speed networks at home can watch high-quality video. Who knows, maybe we’ll test it out and start our own Last Gadget Broadcast station.

The Live Broadcaster is due to go on sale on January 16th, 2011.

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Jimmy Kimmel Does Entire Show On a Webcam

Posted by Ed Oswald on June 22, 2010 at 3:13 pm

Late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel wasn’t about to let a power failure cancel his show Monday, so he whipped out his MacBook and taped the entire show using Photo Booth. The power problems began affecting the studio Monday evening right around the 7pm taping time, and lasted through nearly to the live air time, which prompted ABC to show a rerun of an older show anyway.

The network isn’t letting Kimmel’s ingenuity go to waste: it plans to show the episode as shot by Kimmel tonight at his normal airtime of 12:05am. While the quality of the audio and the video isn’t going to be too hot, from what is being said about the episode it should be pretty interesting.

The guests booked still get interviewed, the musical guest still plays — just with a lot less videographic pizazz. Kimmel also apparently walks around and interviews staffers in an attempt to salvage the show. Kimmel says he blames the electrical problems on BP.

“I’m sure they’re responsible somehow,” he quipped. He also added that the stunt wasn’t an intentional plug for Apple, and added he’s actually hoping the company would not be upset with it.

How could they though? They just got free promotion for saving a network show. That’s gotta count for something.

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Vitamin D’s Brainier Take on Video Monitoring Software

Posted by Harry McCracken on February 8, 2010 at 3:11 pm

What’s Palm founder Jeff Hawkins–one of the few so-called tech visionaries who really is visionary–up to these days? For the past several years, he’s been concentrating on a startup called Numenta that’s attempting to bring intelligence modeled on the human brain to computers via something it calls Hierarchical Temporal Memory. Another startup called Vitamin D–also founded by early staffers at Hawkins’ Palm and Handspring–is the first company to commercialize Numenta’s research. And it’s releasing the first official shipping version of its first product, Vitamin D Video, today. The software is available as a free download for both Windows and OS X.

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