August 2008 Archives

With Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain's surprising announcement of picking Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, many media outlets are finding there aren't many videos quite yet showing the veep hopeful talking about the national elections. Not MTV: back in Super Tuesday in February 2008, MTV street reporter Dani Carlson made a live video interview with Palin using a mobile phone running the Flixwagon application. In the interview, Palin talks about energy independence, being a Washington outsider, and of course, Alaska. Also, Palin mentions her support of Ron Paul, but not McCain. Check out the full exclusive interview on MTV:

http://newsroom.mtv.com/2008/08/29/sarah-palin-republican-vice-presidential-nominee-plugs-romney-paul-but-not-mccain-in-mtv-interview/



Thumbnail of early MTV interview with Sarah Palin via Flixwagon. Exclusive video available on MTV site.

A few great upgrades today for our iPhone 2.0.x version:

1. New EDGE-friendly and high resolution settings: we added a new setting specifically for Edge connections with lower video quality but much faster upload time. Very useful when you're out and about, both on original iPhone and iPhone 3G (which tends to jump back to Edge every so often). We also added a Still Items setting, for showing higher resolution, yet mostly-still items like pictures or presentations while capturing sound. The original settings still include high frame rate broadcast (for videos with motion), and high resolution (for sharper frames).



2. Chat function: you can now see chat messages from your viewers directly on the iPhone screen. When viewers on Flixwagon.com comment on your video while you're broadcasting, the messages will appear on your screen.




3. New app design (see above).


To get the updated app, go to Cydia or Installer 4 on your iPhone 3G/2.0.1, refresh "Changes" (Cydia) or "Sources" (Installer), and follow the upgrade instructions. You may need to restart your phone to see our new icon. To install the app from scratch use the following instructions: http://flixwagon.com/pickphone/IPhone/.

As usual, let us know what you think!

Following several successful projects with Flixwagon, MTV yesterday deployed a number of street reporters armed with Flixwagon-equipped mobile phones to cover the National Democratic Convention in Denver. A similar number of reporters will also be on the scene using Flixwagon at the upcoming Republican National Convention.

The street reporters are making live videos throughout the four days of the convention from their mobile phones directly to their pages on the MTV Think website, in another installment of MTV's Choose or Lose campaign. The street reporters can easily broadcast live video and capture the atmosphere of the conventions in real-time without the need for large camera crews or bulky equipment. The official release is here.

Some of the videos and street reporters can be found here:

http://think.mtv.com/profile/trevorFmartin

http://think.mtv.com/profile/cgeraci25

http://think.mtv.com/profile/MiGoNev

http://think.mtv.com/profile/janeflemingkleeb

http://think.mtv.com/Issues/politics



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Great news: Flixwagon is now available for iPhone 3G and for original iPhones running firmware 2.0.1!
After being first to broadcast from iPhones back in June, and first to launch our public iPhone app for 1.1.4  in July, we're now releasing our app for iPhone 3G and original iPhone 2.0.x. This means we now support all iPhone models and firmware!

To install you'll need an 'opened' iPhone with either Cydia or Installer. Simply open Cydia or Installer, make sure all your versions and resources are up-to-date, and then install Flixwagon from the multimedia folder (under 'Sections' in Cydia, or 'Categories' in Installer 4. You can also find it under the iSpazio directory). Special thanks to Fabiano from iSpazio.net for all the great help with Cydia and Installer!




Flixwagon iPhone Broadcast Screen

Advantages:

• Super-fast sign-up: there is no need to sign-up in advance anywhere. Simply launch the app on your iPhone, enter your phone number, and you'll be instantly logged-in and can start broadcasting video immediately. You'll also receive an SMS message with your new user name and password which you can then change or restore via flixwagon.com.

Express Registration

• Highest Frames per Second rate: Flixwagon broadcasts the highest frame rate per second on iPhone in the market -- at 12 frames per second -- providing a smoother broadcast flow.

Choose between sharper resolution or more frames per second

• Edit video details on the fly: change title and tags directly from the iPhone before or during broadcast. This is especially useful in helping more users discover your broadcast while you're still live, by adding relevant tags and titles based on events in the broadcast.
  

• Set sharing preferences directly from the device: set flix as private, public, or viewable only by certain groups like friends, family, co-workers, etc., all directly from the iPhone and while broadcasting. 

Edit video details and sharing preferences on the fly

• Light app: the entire package is only 98Kb.
  

If you're using iPhone 1.1.4 of older check out info for your phone. Please note, the iPhone apps (1.1.4 and 2.0.1) are both in Alpha, and are used primarily for us to learn and experiment more with the iPhone platform. Feel free to email us comments or feedback about the alpha app at feedback [at] flixwagon [dot] com. Once the iPhone SDK supports native video we expect to develop an app for the new official app store. We don't encourage 'opening' or 'jailbreaking' iPhones and users do so at their own risk.

36 hours, 600 clips, over 6 Million video streams, 60,000 hours of video viewed, 90,000 user comments, at least 2 clips per hour on air during commercial breaks on MTV over the weekend, three 30-minute compilations on TV -- shot entirely on mobile phones, over a dozen locations including backstage at Madison Square Garden, and 3 Jonas Brothers. These are some of the stats from MTV's Jonas Brothers event this past weekend using Flixwagon. We knew this was going to be our biggest event to-date, but it surpassed even our wildest expectations. For example, according to MTV, the latest season finale of reality show The Hills got 5 Million video streams during its first 3 days.  The Jonas Bros event pulled in more traffic in a much shorter period of time, and consisted of live videos made via mobile phones -- making this the biggest live mobile video event in the world to-date that we know of. The official press release is here.

As mentioned last week, we provided MTV with the Flixwagon platform to cover the Jonas Brothers tour of their new album “A Little Bit Longer”. Throughout the 36-hour event, a number of MTV bloggers and reporters made live videos directly to the MTV site and TV studio using mobile phones running the Flixwagon application. The videos showed the Jonas Brothers as they traveled and prepared for their concerts and even showed some candid moments like the brothers reacting emotionally to some items on the news. Even the brothers themselves carried one of the phones and made several live videos throughout the event.
 


MTV Website with the Flixwagon video player, showing Kevin Jonas making a live mobile video using Flixwagon

Apart from the successful event itself, what we’re also extremely happy about is that we were able to show again how the Flixwagon platform can scale and be customized to fit different types of live broadcasts, in terms of number of concurrent broadcasters, web video streams, and streaming from mobile phones to internet and/or television.

All the videos are available exclusively on the MTV site here: http://jonasbros.mtv.com.

Some very exciting news today: for the first time in a music event of such a scale, MTV will use Flixwagon to broadcast live video feeds from numerous mobile phones to the web and TV from the Jonas Brothers tour of their new album this weekend. This is great news, not only because it's the biggest event by a band of this level of fame to receive continuous live mobile video coverage of their tour on and off stage, but also because we're expecting our highest-ever traffic of any single event to-date!



Jonas Brother in Concert (Source: Official Jonas Brothers Flickr)

During the event, a number of MTV bloggers/reporters will broadcast live videos from their 3G mobile phones to the MTV website and TV channel using Flixwagon while they tour with the tween sensations. The videos will give a personal peak behind the scenes of the Jonas Brothers in real time as they travel and get ready for their shows in Jones Beach and Madison Square Garden. The best Flixwagon clips will also be broadcast on MTV's TV channel during commercial breaks, as well as during two special 30-minute compilation programs. Also, viewers on MTV.com will be able to comment on videos and chat with the bloggers and other viewers.



We've been providing MTV with live mobile broadcasting solutions for some time, for example with their live citizen journalist coverage of the Super Tuesday Primaries, but this one should be a record breaker for us in terms of number of videos, viewers, and general fun to be had.

Coverage on both MTV and MTV.com will start on Friday, August 8th 2008 at 4pm ET/PT and run through Saturday August 9th at 10pm ET/PT. Feel free to check out all videos on http://jonasbros.mtv.com. MTV will also show select clips during commercial breaks on MTV Friday and Saturday, and on two compilation shows on Saturday August 9th at 2pm and 10pm.

The MTV bloggers will be carrying mobile phones with the Flixwagon application that allows them to broadcast live video with one click to the web and TV studio (without any bulky equipment or cumbersome file transfers). The entire mobile broadcast is powered by the Flixwagon platform.

Hope you get a chance to watch the live broadcasts, and feel free to give us your feedback or contact us with any questions. Here's some more info from MTV's Buzzworthy blog: http://buzzworthy.mtv.com/2008/08/07/jonas-brothers-are-about-to-get-live-mobile-and-were-going-along-for-the-ride/
 

Join us this coming Thursday (August 7th,10:45AM at the Pace Plaza in NYC) to watch our very own Sarig Reichert participate in the "The New Mobile Paradigm" panel during the Web 2.0 Conference! Sarig will be speaking along with respected peers from MeetMoi.com and MotionBox.com. We look forward to the open and engaging discussion. Hope to see you there! For more information, please visit here