On Friday 15 January, we conducted a first experiment with the platform 'blab.im'. During festival Winternachten, we reported live, via the internet. We did that in English, because most of the viewers we had were English-speaking. We could see that. That's already the most striking difference between something like Blab.im, and ordinary television.
Blab.im is still virtually unknown in the Netherlands. Only a few technically savvy types are working with it. Nevertheless, I firmly believe that blab.im will grow. To do so, they will still have to compete in the various appstores with the existing social network blab, which is meant for completely different things than blab.im. You get situations like this more and more often, where someone develops something for which someone else has already thought up a name.
For now, the naming is secondary to the features offered by the free platform. And those are fantastic. In a nutshell, you can hold video conferences with the whole world, where the whole world can actually talk along. The blab.im principle is that you can dial into a screen with four people at once using your iPhone, or your desktop plus webcam. Viewers can therefore join in the conversation themselves, which is broadcast live, and they can chat along via social media and special sidebars in which text messages can be posted.
Blab.im is not the only streaming service for video chats, but it is the easiest. Anyone who has ever tried a Google hangout-on-air out to broadcast, understands what I mean. Little fuss is needed, camera and microphone do their job, and chatting along is possible, but not mandatory.
Because it was the first time, yesterday, we are going to do it again today, in a slightly different way. Not a three-hour marathon broadcast, but short pieces, in which we hope to supplement meaningful conversations from The Hague with nice contributions from you: our readers and viewers.
For that, you need to do little more than keep an eye on us via our channel on blab.im. Create a free account there, and you're in.
It would be nice to see some of you stop by tonight! Art is a conversation, so let's have it online now.
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