We’re trying an experiment with the Broadband conference this week. We’re going to live stream one presentation. Here are the details for folks who might want to check in:

What: University of Minnesota – Morris presentation: “We want to live in Intelligent Communities!”
Where: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/mn-broadband-conference
When: Thursday Oct 14. 2:05-2:35 (CST)

So please tune in. If you have an account with Ustream you can post questions. I don’t know if we will be able to manage accessing questions on site.(You don’t need an account to view/listen to the session.) As I said, this is an experiment but I’m optimistic that it will go well.

For folks who might be interested I’ll say just a little about our experience and costs of setting this up so far. I signed up for a free account at Ustream. I set up “my show” by entering details. We’re tested with me broadcasting a sample show from my office in St Paul and Becky LaPlant acting as my reviewer in Grand Rapids. We decided to get a better quality mic and we’re going to try using the webcams we have – because we know with our material that most folks will be interested in audio more than video. I suspect that is usually the case. We know there is broadband at the conference, which we will need.

So we have a couple of hours of staff time sunk into this and a mic, which cost less than $200.

I’ll post a comment after the conference to let folks know how this goes. It seems like a fairly cheap and easy way to broadcast programming to a community. Costs would rise if you knew you were going to have an audience of any size. (I don’t know how much traffic Ustream can handle) but once you built up an audience it might be easier to rationalize a larger budget.