Veodia’s Ten Minutes May 16, 2007

Intro: Veodia is a web-based videoblogging and streaming service, designed for ordinary folk without a lot of tech knowhow, but powerful enough for pros.

How the company sees it: “Simply plug your camera into your computer, log on to Veodia, and press Start to begin broadcasting live interactive TV broadcasts over the Internet to thousands of viewers on computers and mobile phones. When you press Stop at the end, the recording is instantly available for on-demand playback on computers, cell phones, iPods and Apple TVs.”

Exec Sum: A good start to making live videocasting something anyone can do.

My tenminut.es: You need to sign up and install a plug-in for Internet Explorer (won’t work in other browsers) and you’ll need QuickTime to watch the feed. Oh, and while it works seamlessly with TypePad it doesn’t yet support other blogging platforms. Apart from that it’s pretty straightforward.

Start a new broadcast, let the software find your webcam (you can select a different camera and a different microphone) and off you go. (You can choose to go live or record one to broadcast at a later date.)  The software will first detect your bandwidth, which, in my case, took a few minutes. In your browser you’ll see what everyone else sees, as well as any messages sent in by viewers.

Just click stop once you’ve finished, and your videocast will be saved in your library, along with details such as when, how long and how big the videocast was. Previous videocasts will remain as separate posts on your chosen blog.

Viewers meanwhile will see a new blog post in your TypePad blog and an image from the broadcast. Clicking on the image should launch the QuickTime plugin and you’ll be able to watch the broadcast from the beginning. Previous

Quibbles: I couldn’t get the feed to load in another browser as a viewer quickly enough for my tastes but it could be the lousy connection. When the videocast did load it didn’t seem to capture anything that was still being broadcast live. Also the whole kaboodle seems to suck up a lot of CPU, resulting in a few more browser crashes than I’d like.

Verdict: Promising but needs to work a bit more seamlessly, and have a few more tips for both users and viewers, to gain a following.

Score: 6 out of 10