This month’s Video Working Group meeting was all about Sling, a video streaming service. It’s an affordable setup that is designed to be incredibly user-friendly and powerful. Stephen Toback reported seeing this at NAB earlier this year. While the model is technically “version one”, Sling Studio is doing a lot to show how robust its product continues to do a lot to improve the existing technology. With the basic technology selling at $999, it’s definitely worth checking out.
We discussed how our various needs could have been met with a setup like this – the topic of graduation came up a lot, but there are certainly many other instances throughout the year we could use this for that would seem to save a lot of headaches.
Here were some of the cool things that were discussed about the product:
- Battery is easily swappable without breaking the feed in the middle of a recording, or you can plug it in. The batteries can also hold up to a three hour charge.
- Works with cameras and phones, including android through the free capture app.
- You can connect up to 10 total camera sources in one stream, 4 of which can be in queue with one main camera.
- Easy to control audio live.
- High quality streams.
- Simple integration with speaker’s slide presentation or other notes if necessary.
- The CameraLink has an indicator that can be turned towards the individual videographers that indicates whether their shot is live or not.
- Can capture to SD card or an external drive.
There are tons more things to talk about with this easy-to-use product (there was a lot of emphasis on how teens had been able to use this on the fly with no training), so check out their website and Steve’s NAB report for more.
