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Has anyone done real-time video broadcasting?

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Real Estate Agent with SurfTheTurf.com, Inc.

Has anyone done any real-time video broadcasting?  We've been burning videos of properties for a client, but there are always a lot of questions asked, so I was thinking that maybe I would just do a live broadcast so that the client can ask me a few questions while I am at the property and we can zoom in and address the questions while I am there.  Do you know of any service where they do this sort of thing?  Or, if you've done it, can you tell me what kind of equipment you used to do the capture and then which cell service you used to do the real time upload to the broadcasting servers?  I'm probably not the only person interested in this, so any help is appreciated.  I don't know that I'm willling to invest a lot in this, which is why I ask the service question.

Also, if you've done this yourself and you have some samples of the capture from a real-time feed, I'd be very interested in seeing those.  If you've used a service, info about who they are, how much they charge, and whether you liked what they did would be great.  We can all dig in and ask the questions, but a review would be fantastic.

Margaret

 
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Fred Light
| Nashua Video Tours - Nashua, NH
Real Estate Video Tours for MA and NH

I attempted something similar last fall - InteractiveOpenHouse.com

It wasn't totally live.  A prerecorded video tour was made of the home, as well as a secondary tour of the neighborhood.  Individual photos could be pulled up of each room if people had questions. 

The agent WAS live on camera - there to answer questions, etc.

I would say it pretty much was a disaster on several counts:

1)  Of the 50 people there viewing, 50 were realtors!  They all wanted to 'buy' this product, which at that time was NOT a 'product' for sale, per se, and more of an experiment.  It was advertised heavily to the public, yet, just as with a real open house... nobody showed up!  For me, I could care less about realtors!  If the public doesn't embrace the concept, it's worthless.  And at least with that experiment, they did not show up!

2)  The agent, once he realized there were 50 people in the room, became the proverbial 'deer in headlights' and no longer remembered that he could speak. One broker wanted to come on (via video) from Arizona, which then created horrible feedback.  The computer froze up midway through. It was a complete disaster!  I used a company called 'Proclaim'.

I think the idea is still good, and may revisit it later.  i'm not 100% sure it's giving that much more than the video tour already had that one could watch ANYTIME.  We were giving the live access to the listing agent, but I also think that most people would rather NOT talk to a house salesman, so maybe that's not a big incentive!

If you're doing just one video for one client, you could probably do that pretty easily using this system - and it's free. 

There's a multilevel marketing company called "Hello World" that offers something similar (they're constantly soliciting here on AR, so you can search them out)  But they cost money, their 'salespeople' are extremely aggressive - irritatingly so - and their websites I find to be confusing, hard to navigate and broken many times - and I know my way around the web. I can only imagine the frustration that most people feel.  And of course there is nobody to complain to because everything goes through their marketing channel (aka their salespeople), most who are really out to sell and don't understand most of the technical aspects of this business.

Jan 28, 2008 07:20 AM
Margaret Hokkanen
SurfTheTurf.com, Inc. - Carlsbad, CA
→ Carlsbad Real Estate
The main problem, as I see it, from a technical perspective is getting a reliable FAST broadband connection to the Internet to shoot the video frames as they are happening.  It's easy to do with a cable connection, but a cellular connection?  I know you can buy signal/antenna amplifiers for cell connections, but I'm not sure whether a cell connection is going to cut it.
Jan 28, 2008 09:31 AM
Fred Light
| Nashua Video Tours - Nashua, NH
Real Estate Video Tours for MA and NH
Absolutely.  And for whatever it's worth, I was using a fiber optic connection (30 Mbps downloads and 5 Mbps uploads), which is considerably faster than cable or DSL. And it still crashed!
Jan 28, 2008 09:45 AM