The Wardman Wire

This week I want to introduce Wardman Wire readers to the current wealth of technology available to budding media moguls. Things have moved at a great pace since 18 Doughty Street was launched. CampaignTV.org has come along and serves as the latest example in this small UK political internet TV market.

But, how easy is it to get going? Well, thanks to Mogulus you can have your own TV station up and running in less than an hour. And, what is more, you don’t need your own studio. You can even start up without having a camera!

YouTube Built In

One of the beautiful things about Mogulus is how it taps into YouTube to offer producers millions of videos to drop into their mix. All you do is enter your search terms and then drag a video from YouTube into your storyboard. The Mogulus system then converts the clip, which takes a little while, and then makes it available either for you to mix manually or for your auto-pilot to take care of.

Auto-Pilot

You don’t even have to sit there and operate your TV channel. You can let the auto-pilot do all that for you. Just tell it what storyboards to make use of and it’ll sit there all day scrolling through the content. In my example TV channel I have set up Thatcher Weekend, which is just back-to-back Margaret Thatcher videos being left alone to run until Monday. The only downside is that I have to manually instruct the auto-pilot to go to John Bolton Monday. Mogulus is still in beta, so some small features are still missing.

Uploading Your Own or Going Live

So you can just trot out a load of old YouTube content, but what if you’ve got your own stack of videos lying around or want to do live commentary on a current news event. Mogulus does that too. And here’s the greatest feature: multiple webcams supported.

With this feature you can build a network of reporters all around the country each with their own login details to your studio. When they’re signed in and their webcam switched on they appear in your list of available cameras. You can then switch between John in Hull, Peter in Portsmouth and Joanna in Wales seemlessly. That means you could build your own nationwide news channel, complete with local content and news. Do a bit of pre-planning and you can have some videos to go with the content, all thanks to YouTube.

But, what if you’ve edited your own videos? Well, Mogulus supports uploading too. Give it some time to process your collection of greatest speeches, but sure enough you can have your own library all ready to rock into your own TV show. Maybe you can use it to do a special debate show with your guests all hooked up to webcams around the country.

Starbucks

Because Mogulus can work with a standard webcam as well as a more fully-featured studio you can pop down to Starbucks and hook on to the WiFi there and get yourself ready for an outside broadcast. Wannabe political journalists could just invite MPs and Peers to the Starbucks nearest to College Green for their exclusive interview. Indeed, with increasing speeds available with mobile broadband you might even be able to do a live interview or report from right outside the Houses of Parliament. Neat, eh?

Cost

It’s up to you. You can splash out on good cameras, mobile broadband and a decent laptop and get up and running for less than £3,000. Or you can start with naff all and just run YouTube videos or upload your own. Mogulus is free at the moment, but that’s because they drop an advert into your broadcast every 13 minutes or so, but you’ll soon be able to pay for a pro account to get rid of that or even control your own advertising.

Go Get It

Mogulus is in closed beta right now, so not everybody will be allowed to get access to the system. But, if you’ve got a good idea for a channel you should hop along to mogulus.com and apply today. Tell them that Mike Rouse sent you, too!