Look at that. The eagle just laid some eggs and is taking care of them in the nest! You’ll also get to watch how the eagle builds to the nest while still taking care of the eggs.

This is a screenshot of our embedded player for the Neokast Beta test. It’s a live stream all the way from Sidney, British Columbia. We will be telling you a lot more about the Hancock Wildlife Foundation another time.

Did we have to go there and set up a bunch of equipment and servers? Nope. Remember we’re empowering YOU to live stream. It didn’t take much time for us to interface and set up this stream with David and Rich. Pretty soon (after we’ve made our QuicKast user friendly so that anyone can use it) you will be able to live stream your own stuff with a click of a button.

For those of you who have tried to view streams on other websites…notice how BIG our embedded player is. It covers up at least half of the screen. If that’s too small for you, you can click on the little icon on the bottom right or double-click the screen itself. It will give you a full screen view. Oh, and that image is a screenshot from a 300kbps stream.

When you log onto the Neokast web site, you will be able to click on this nice stream in addition to several others for your enjoyment. It takes about two to three seconds tops from clicking on the icon to viewing the stream. For some it’s been less than a second.

This is a WEB 3.0 application! This means that you never, ever have to hit the browser back button. Our website is one big dynamic java application. We do not have a sea of web pages that you have to navigate through. Once you’re done viewing the stream and want to view a new one, all you have to do is hit ‘home’ or ‘live streams’ again to get the menu of streams. The days of scrolling left/right/up/down on a webpage, clicking on hyperlinks, and hitting reload and back are OVER.

The reports are in from the first wave of invited beta testers. A TON of people are using the service and think it’s pretty cool. There are a couple kinks but that’s what a beta is for.

Here are a couple big FYIs for those that are about to be invited…

1. The Neokast Beta software installation takes a minute or two which does not include downloading DirectX 9.0c and the .NET framework. We have found that more than half have both installed already. So for those of you waiting on a beta invite and want to speed up installation, go ahead and make sure you have both of those installed. Both are FREE for download from Microsoft. The installation is much faster if both of those are already installed.
2. What have we accomplished today? We fixed a couple problems and placed a nice assortment of live streams on the Neokast website. These streams can be enjoyed for just about everyone that has a plugged in cable/DSL/fiber/T1/ethernet connection.
3. For right now, you will only be able to view the streams. As we mentioned above, we are finalizing QuicKast so that it will be available mid April on the beta. It will make it child’s play to stream from your camera or from file.
4. Remember to use Internet Explorer with Windows XP. Firefox with Windows XP is next.
5. Neokast is more than just an embedded player for our website. We’re perfecting the Neokast Stream Player for your web site as well. That’s a standalone application that will enable you to view, search, and create live streams without using a browser.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 at 11:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, Neokast BETA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.