For those of you who have been following us since we rocked the VON Show, you might remember that one of our early blog entries mentioned the Internet Space Race of 2007. Indeed, we are a company that backs up every one of our claims with real, tangible results you can use…

We are close to delivering what we feel is one giant leap for the entire web 3.0 community - allowing everyone in the world to live stream their own content from the following:

• Webcam (which, by the way, has been done before by other sites and companies out there in a highly quality and amount of users-limited fashion - I mean, come on, no one wants to watch live streamed video at anything less than 256kbps. Even in our beta we’re easily doing 1.0Mbps. You’ll notice that even our webcam streams will be a cut above any webcam streams you’ve ever seen.)
• Digital Video [DV] Camera (no company has ever opened up live streaming from DV Camera to the general public for low or no cost)
• From File (sure other sites will let you upload 5 minute flash-transcoded clips to their website, but aren’t you tired of the limitations and sacrifices you have to make in your art?)

We have encouraged all of you in the past to think of interesting projects you’d like to accomplish with live streaming, and the ideas haven’t stopped hitting our inboxes since VON. So basically you need to be connected to the Internet to live stream - it’s like humans breathing. Should you have to rely on being tethered to an ethernet connection or just hope that you have have a wireless connection when you’re out in the field? NO WAY!

Take a look at the following year old press release from Sprint concerning their Wireless Mobile Broadband service. Quite surprisingly, their EV-DO Revision A service combined with this Sierra Wireless aircard remains affordable and looks to be a nice way for the general public to live stream “out in the wild.” Their service has been heavily expanded and upload/download bandwidth is the highest out of all the other providers out there [please do correct us if we’re wrong at our questions email address].

So in more ways than one, Neokast is starting a culture where conventional norms of streaming and Internet usage are getting thrown out the window. Neokast users will see very interesting live streams on the Neokast Media Network and they’ll wonder - how was that possibly streamed on the Internet out there with that degree of quality? Where are the cables? It must have cost a fortune!

NOT SO. Those streams will be your streams. Streaming out in streets, fields, beaches, roads, wherever…will be fun, easy, and little or no cost. We’re making it happen for you.

Well…

• The eagle streams work great now (you can see the baby eagles peeking out of the nest).
• We have a big sponsorship with the Silverlake Film Festival culminating in a party this upcoming Sunday (by the way, can you even imagine what we have cooking up behind the scenes in LA LA land…we have very innovative people on staff)
• We have countless people emailing us with their extremely clever projects that even we had not thought of. Some of them are on a large, massive scale that have the potential to create sweeping change. Others are small and crafty and might be just one shot deals with people who want to have fun with our service. We accomodate everyone and are happy to do it!
• Our amount of beta users is increasing daily and we’re making great strides daily with improvements.

What’s next? Some of you following us may have noticed the Joost “launch” today. That seems all fine and good, but do they have plans to do anything live? No. They want you to watch archived TV with them on your computer. TV, as we know it, is over in the Web 3.0 age we are introducing.

Do they have any mechanism in place to allow you to live stream from any camera and have it persistently archived through a media network so that streams can be viewed later in an On-Demand fashion? No.

Do they have any plans for you to make money off of their service with Pro, Pay-Per-View, On-Demand, and commercial client services? No - why would they want to do that? They have plans to make money hand over fist on ADS that you’ll watch while sitting in front of your computer. Neokast is not ad focused and we have no notion of “pay-per-click.”

Joost does allow you to watch programs streamed at a run-of-the-mill bitrate though. We support any bitrate you would like to support for your user base. Try hooking up Joost to your big plasma screen. There’s a big difference between near-TV quality and HD.

Our service is much more dynamic and allows you participate in a cornucopia of ways. We’re testing out all kinds of things with QuicKast as we speak, and we will be rolling it out to you soon. Get your webcams and “nicer” cameras ready. It’s going to be a lot of fun.