CNN Live & Octoshape – impressions

News – right here, right now
Since posting “Spectacular save on the Hudson – watching it Live from CNN” I’ve been watching quite a few hours of CNN Live – it’s been a good experience, easy to get going and most of all – stable.

The video quality is definitely watchable, running in the standard CNN.com Live player, that I prefer having in the background, on a secondary screen. The audio quality could be better and crackles occasionally. The stream rarely stuttered – twice over the span of a few hours, when it appeared that the player was making a call to CNN’s metrics server. The interruption lasted 2-3 seconds and the stream recovered fully without image distortion/blocking. It’s professionally produced and presented – even with occasional breaks with music as a filler ;o)

The shape of a plugin
The installation of the Ocotoshape plugin for Flash went very smoothly and I’m quite impressed, though I’m missing a more user friendly control interface, if say I’d want to easily disable or uninstall this P2P / grid-distributed streaming add-on.
I also tried their client to watch some listed channels. Again in this case, the installation went smoothly, and I could start streams in my VLC player. I was happy to see a friendlier control interface through the menu bar. A few things that are still lacking is easy uninstall and a bit more verbose help. Zapping channels in the playlist was responsive. I’m looking forward to more!

Flashmagazine’s post on this is a good read too – especially if you’re interested in un-installing the plugin:

According to the License Agreement you have to accept, the Octoshape software will auto-update itself. This is probably cool, but how do you remove it? On a PC, you can simply uninstall it using the control panel’s add/remove programs feature. On a Mac, the average user won’t be able to locate the software, so it is impossible to uninstall it. This is a serious problem and should be solved right away by Octoshape or it could backfire. Simply putting the uninstall instructions in the FAQ would be an improvement. According to Octoshape’s support department, “You unfortunately have to do it manually at the moment, by deleting the folder called ‘octoshape’ which can be located in ‘\Users\\Library\Preferences\Macromedia\Flash Player \www.macromedia.com\bin\”

Update: Watching Barack Obama’s inauguration through the day, has certainly been interesting. “Live streaming” is growing up – no longer just linear tv in a browser window, Lifehacker’s post goes to show where the convergence of platforms and community participation is going. Techcrunch’s post on the CNN Live + Facebook “link-up”, has some numbers worth re-reading and it will be very interesting to follow more about how the various providers and CDN’s fared through the day. Some emerging stats available through NewTeeVee