Drazen Pantic used off-the-shelf, inexpensive hardware and software combined with a community Wi-Fi network to broadcast to live television: Citizen videobloggers take note. Pantic describes the system he used (drawn as a simple schematic not much more complicated than the actual installation) to perform a live, public-access television broadcast managed by him and two colleagues. The topic? How they were doing what they were doing, of course.
Pantic's essay walks through the drop in price, increase in quality, and proliferation of open-source tools and patent-free/license-free standards that can allow practically anyone to produce streaming, broadcast quality television or recorded digital video for later editing and airing.
We established a wireless connection through a local, public WiFi network maintained by the non-profit NYC Wireless, and broadcast from that spot to a computer at MNN studios. The video and audio was captured by the camcorder and fed into the laptop, where it was encoded as MPEG4/AAC streams, then sent out as a unicast stream via the WiFi connection. At MNN they played the stream through a scan converter -- which converts the stream on a computer into a video signal -- then broadcast it live on the air.
It's not just a sign of things to come. It's a sign that things have changed.