Monday 1 March 2010

Surfing in the bath

I was using Twitter the other day in the bath when I happened to see a tweet by Ed Fraser who describes himself on Twitter as: Senior Programme Editor, Channel 4 News/Online. Covered Iraq, Kosovo, Lebanon, Soham, Tsunami. Seriously Scottish

The tweet that caught my eye was: “Watching #Tsunami live on mac is amazing. Only in the 21st century via http://www.ustream.tv/channel/hitsunami #hitsunami.”

I’d heard about UStream but couldn’t remember seeing it in action so I thought I’d check it out.  It sounded like the sort of tool that might be useful.

I knew Ed was viewing on a Mac but I had an iPhone and they’re both Apple so the experience would be the same - right?

I can’t remember the exact sequence of events but I ended up having to download the UStream Application and creating an account.

I then went back into Twitter and clicked on the link again.  I am not sure exactly what choices I was presented with but remember having to choose between Live and Local.  As it was a live event I wanted to view, I clicked Live.

The next thing I remember was the screen changing to look a little like this:

iphone

Remember I’m in the bath.

The next thing I know, the shutter is opening and I can see my bath through the shutter aperture and there a little message saying “Streaming to http:// …”

I didn’t wait to capture the web address, which is just as well.  I think I may have been streaming live images of my bath onto the world wide web.  I think all anyone would have seen would have been bath, water and bubbles.  I hope all that anyone would have seen would have been bath, water and bubbles.

2 comments:

Adam Perry said...

Ooops! I gather you have a 3GS then..!

Ann Cardus said...

Ho hum. Yes.