I saw a screenshot one day in flickr taken by Andy Rush from University of Mary Washington of StationCreator and I honestly thought they were building some #ds106 platform. I left a comment about wanting to learn more and moved on … I guess thinking that Andy would see my comment and tell me all about what was being built. But nothing happened. Then yesterday I was looking through flickr activity (what else is there to do when you have the flu) and I saw the screenshot again. This time I looked at the URL and it was just some service. I just checked it out … nothing earth shattering I don’t think, but interesting nonetheless. Essentially it lets you take content from around the web and build playlists of videos into channels that can be made available on a schedule. I guess sort of what TV was like back in the day — you had to show up to watch it. That in and of itself is both silly and nostalgic. I instantly started to dream of running my own station, but quickly realized that the Internet has killed that. But it was fun to dream about yesterday fondly for a few brief seconds.
So, that’s what it looks like. Sorry to waste your time. Blame the Internet.
I wouldn’t be so quick to discount something like it as a form of content distribution just because on-demand is so popular these days. I found myself staring for a good 30 minutes at Vinepeak (http://vinepeek.com/) the other day. DS106Radio is still going strong after 2 years and relies on the exact same approach of “everyone is listening to the same thing at the same time”. There’s something to be said for shared experiences. The element I think that would make it interesting is a live component. Scheduled broadcasts with interruptions by live content would make for a dynamic station. That being said I don’t see anything like that with the service right now (their reference to livestreams seems to be “yes we’ll embed a Ustream/Justin.TV type player to play at a certain time”) and the pricing is way overblown for what it provides (they’re not even hosting the video, it’s all fed in from external services).
I was being ironic. I Failed. I think I’ll blame the Internet. But … now that you say it, the idea of canned crap being interrupted by bursts of live content could be interesting.
Irony can hurt. I’m thinking of rolling out something just to have an ongoing play of all the video we have accumulated from ds106, which is scattered across various youtube accounts, vimeo etc. I can see some value in being able to see something interesting that might play later in the day.
And Tim is already doing something with on demand anyone broadcasting. Andy and I talked a bit about this, it gets pricier for the live cut ins.