Mogulus

There are times when really really really neat pieces of software appear out of nowhere and take you by surprise. OS X Leopard was like that. OS X Server too. Joomla, Dreamhost’s panel. Symfony, Coda, Photoshop, iLife, iWork, iTunes…really really high quality, rock solid applications that make you remember why it’s not just productive but fun to use a computer to get things done.

Today was one of those days. I stumbled upon Mogulus after a friend told me he was having trouble with some of his students breaking copyright laws with it. Intrigued, I checked it out, and was blown away. It’s a free Web 2.0 “Beta” service (like most of the cool stuff on the ‘net) that allows anyone with a broadband connection and a webcam to publish a live video stream to the internet. It’s like YouTube, but instead of uploading a video you make, you produce the video content live, prepare cues for the next clip, can integrate transitions, splash screens, graphics, badges, and even multiple video streams from your webcam, a firewire DV camera or USB camera, mobile phone, OR from anyone with a video device ANYWHERE in the world. You just provision them as a member of your production team, and they’re hardware appears. So you could manage a program from your production office, have a field agent with a laptop and a broadband connection doing an interview, and patch them into your program LIVE. SOOOO COOOL!

Now, I’m not a communications professional, and I really don’t think I’ll be in the communications field, but this is waaaaay cool. The possibilities for providing streamed content are just incredible.

Oh, I didn’t mention HOW you get the streamed content you want in place. For banners, ticker boxes, etc. you type it in and can enable/disable it. When you set up your channel, you can provide a badge that goes in the corner of your stream (which can be turned on/off). To set up content in advance, you create “storyboards” which are preset video lists organized as you like. Now for the good part: video can come from many many sources. Video podcasts, RSS feeds, files on the internet, files on your hard drive, YouTube users OR YouTube searches. This means you can cue up a video clip on your channel and, while it’s playing, get more content ready if you don’t want to use stuff already in your media library. You get it cued up and you’re live! And, if you’re away from your studio but still want to run content, you just set up the “auto-pilot” which plays clips or storyboards in the order and configuration you like. Cue it up, hit the “go” button on autopilot, and your channel stays on the air 24/7 while you’re away.

The possibilities for providing streamed content live for events and different activities is overwhelmingly neat. One thing I’m especially looking forward to, however, are the possibilities of adopting it’s interface for the Space Center. We currently run on pre-built mission tapes. Wouldn’t it be neat if you could create a playlist for a mission, preload it into your system, have the autopilot configured for science screens/stars, be able to cue up video in advance and, if you really wanted a video clip you could just search and drag it into your system. It’s perfect!

In order to implement something like that, however, you’d need to implement a SAN and several streaming servers in a cluster with a load balancer or something. I’m not familiar enough with data services to be able to design it 100%, but I get the gist of it I think. You’d set up a server with the video files indexed by tags, a mission playlist API call, and you’d be able to stream files from the system over a media distribution network from your data center to your video clients. It’s perfect!

I’m going to bed now before I hurt myself…