Let’s deep dive into the setup and configuration of the @steemcasting setup and costs.

Morning, it’s early here in England and I’ve just finished my modding for @steemhunt so it’s onto the next thing in my list which is to give you a bit of an update about pricing because I need to update the fundition to make this a little more clear — I’m hoping this update makes it over to fundition properly because I’m doing it outside of the platform.

So let’s talk about the numbers, the money, what each part does or will do and how they all hang together, I’ll work on a better mind map of how they all work together and build on that because their are many more parts but this is the basic framework — to give you an idea I’ve made a bullet point list below to give you a firm idea.

• the scheduler — the main part that does all the outputting to streams
• rtmp - the server endpoints where we stream to, rtmp servers
• @vlogging - the steem community we will build for media makers
• other chains - eventually our system could be used as ‘stations’
• socials - social media platforms that we use for awareness
• frame.io - third party tool to allow rapid @vlogging to be done
• advertising - paid quick fire ‘break/infomericals’ about the chain

I’ll try and pull together a better chart for the next post showing you my thinking and how they all interact together to pull this together, at first it might be that we interleave existing content and teaching with some live shows, maybe make our @teamaudio and @productsense audio podcasts into video podcasts as well to include them as video content that will be VOD (video on demand) as well to make the time up per day — the short term aim is 720p and four hour blocks of streams once we reach the first level of funding.

THE SCHEDULER PART

Monthly running cost around $100
Yearly running cost around $1000
(discounted obviously for the yearly cost)

This will give us the ability to stream in blocks of four hours at a time meaning that we will need to schedule six blocks of fours of content each day if we wanted to have a twenty four hour stream, that’s the end goal and obviously that’s going to take time to get to that goal because of need to organise content, editing and working together to make sure that content comes in — that’s for VOD content btw, not live streaming content which could be a similar msp-waves style scheduler, which we are also looking at building but with better notification features.

The scheduler will allow us if we so wish to stream to 30+ streaming capable platforms at once, not only that it will give us a unified chat box that will allow all the chat to be in one place and even discord integration (although I expect those to be clunky and not very reliable)

Along with this package we can store 40 files at a time (so we can upload those blocks of four hour chunks) eventually meaning that if we had enough content we could squeeze enough of a schedule together for at least six years, our intention is obviously to ultimately make that seven days if we have those six, four hour blocks of content (making 24hrs) ready to go, it’s a huge undertaking so it might be littered with live content in the schedule and maybe a music channel with open source music played with just a chat in between the ‘content’

We also need to be careful about the file size, a four hour file will be big and actually for a full HD file will probably be over 10gb in size (the max we can have on this service) — it also takes a long time to move a 10gb file to the net if you don’t have the right connectivity, as we ramp up over time we will look to source some co-location facilities that have gigabit internet to provide us with the upstream we need to do this in an effective and efficient fashion without worrying about time delays.

We can schedule up to 10 streams which basically means we can upload 10 x 4 hr blocks (therefore 40 hrs) and anyone time, this means we have roughly a day and a bit going up so it’s a rolling block of content — the scheduler however does have an integration feature with our adventube process so that might turn out to be very useful for taking videos from the community and feeding that into an automated section of time too, again, it will need constantly iteration and planning.

THE @VLOGGING COMMUNITY PART

Monthly running cost around $29 (basic package currently)
(discounted obviously for the yearly cost)

We already did a test of this third party platform as part of a month long project called adventube in December where we replied and answered questions on a daily basis — the idea what to see if the platform was easy enough for everyone to use and was reliable enough to have uploaded content from the users, the idea being that I downloaded the content, edited it and put it back up on dtube/youtube for further consumption.

With this new system we can take content and feed that straight into our schedule automatically from a group of people who are part of the project and use our branding guidelines for steemcasting (an overlay that goes over the top of their content with our branding but highlighting their steem account details and such like)

@steemcasting feeds into the adventube project in that we want to find a way to assist @vlogging to be a lot more mobilised part of the Steem Blockchain journey, mobilising people to make content that other people want or reaching out to brands via block-review.com for tech reviews on technology and gadgets (see that as a channel) when review hunt (from @steemhunt) drops in the coming months — it’s all content that’s happening on the STEEM blockchain and it exposures the talent and community.

CUSTOM RTMP END POINTS

Basic monthly/year cost $19 ( or $190 - 17% off annually)
Professional $49 (or $490 - 17% off annually)

We don’t need to take either of these packages but if we take the basic one that gives us the ability to stream to a custom RTMP — at this stage we are thinking either VIMM or FACEBOOK (yes, I said it, facebook, it get’s crazy traffic for video and live content) so it might be a useful ‘attractor’ to pull in some interest to the STEEM blockchain this way too.

If we have funds to go for the professional package then we can stream to 3 custom RTMP so facebook, vimm and something else that’s not supported currently by the scheduler, all of these remote destinations are able to be pulled together into one unified chat.

WHERE DOES IT ALL STREAM TOO?

Our plan eventually is to stream to as many RTMP locations as possible as services all around the world including Chinese based Live Streaming Platforms (at the moment we can’t signup as no English login help!)

Currently I’m using my own personal periscope account and will soon activate twitch and my youtube channel for multi streaming, I’ve started to create accounts for the other platforms with brand new accounts so they are ready to go, I’m not sure how reliable those platforms will be serving chat messages back to the unified chat but we will see how that goes.

SO WHAT’S NEXT

At the moment I’m pulling together a schedule embed so that we can discuss it with others about how to configure a daily schedule, what that would look like and try to make it accommodating for everyone around the world, we don’t have any snazzy ability to do time zone media shifting (so basically you would watch a breakfast show at breakfast no matter where you are in the world) but that’s something we would love to do eventually.

The core component here is the promotion of steem and it’s media makers, dapps and potential to bring investors and new steemians here — think of it as subtle on boarding and retention of that remote audience based on the content that’s going out — our first big thing is to try and build some four hour blocks of content so I’m working on what that looks like as a block of time and how big the file size is going to be — right now I’m thinking that 720p is going to be the maximum resolution to keep the quality but file size fairly small — if we have to compress it afterwards we can do that too.