Sure legacy network television may soon be wheeled off to an independent living facility. But internet TV is barely out of its crib as TV production technology is now in reach of millions of students, artists, creative types, and the occasional technology blogger. Out of Germany, make.tv gives aspiring TV producers, the ability to mix feeds from both live and pre-recorded sources. I tried make.tv out after TechCrunch Disrupt to see if I too could have a career in television.
Of course, there are lots of tools out there to put together videos–my MacBook’s iMovie, for example–but a single stream of video dost not a TV show maketh. If you want to produce a TV show, or more exactlty a news-oriented show with far flung correspondents, then you’ll need to juggle multiple video streams. And this is where make.tv comes in to help. It’s a cloud-based service with a browser-based studio app: you design a template in which to position your talking heads.
After viewing their help videos, I was able to quickly mock up my vision of a TvB TV show. This was done in under an hour, though as the Hollywood types would say, the production values were not on the high side. TV producers would have little problem dealing with the make.tv Studio app, but it took me a few minutes to orient myself. You can see my work on the make.tv console above, where I was able to place New York and London correspondents side by side with my blog logo in the corner.
Have I mentioned that make.tv has an Android app that lets anyone become an on-the-scene videographer? I used their Broadcaster app in my own testing to simulate a second steam in addition to the one coming from my MacBook.
There are lots of use cases possible with make.tv. Off the top of my head, their studio in the cloud makes great sense for small-to-medium sized businesses, non-profits, schools, local TV stations, news organizations, and any website that needs live broadcast capabilities with participation from many different mobile sources. Make.tv includes an embeddable player for letting your customers and subscribers view your TV show on the Interbooz.
At TechCrunch Disrupt, the company announced their Live Rebroadcast function that sends the make.tv stream to any service that accepts RTMP–for example, YouTube or USTREAM. You simply plug in your make.tv RTMP URL. More instructions can be found here.
make.tv is based on a freemium model.The free version I experimented with lets you stream up to 2500 minutes of video, both live and pre-recorded. Starting at $29.90: 25,000 minutes of video time, ads are eliminated, and RTMP rebroadcast capability is enabled. And finally, for about $300 per month you can have a white label version–best for professional TV production work–that also lets the audience interact through their smartphone video camera.
Photo credit: Magnus Manske