What is it about July 20, 2011? Too many interesting things are being announced.
Now, it’s been a while since we took for granted the wonderful environment of Ustream and Twicas, where you can easily broadcast on the internet with just an iPhone, but now another revolutionary streaming app has appeared.
先日7月20日にリリースされた「TapStream」です。
What it’s all about.
- 「iPhoneをそれぞれWebcamとして利用」 → TapStream Cam
- 「iPadやiPhoneでどのWebcam映像に切り替えるか指令を出す」 → TapStream Switch
- 「これをUsteam Producer等で配信」 → TapStream Driver
So this is an app that does this series of operations all at once. That’s great!
The series is not closed by one app, but as introduced in the list above, multi-camera video distribution is performed by linking the following three apps.
こちらの製品紹介にもある通り、ひとつひとつのアプリは操作が簡単。設定も楽です。
“Use each iPhone as Webcam” → TapStream Cam looks like this.
In this way, you can set up TapStream Cam on the iPhone side, and then, on the iPhone or iPad, you can “command which Webcam video to switch to on the iPad or iPhone” → TapStream Switch.
When you touch the camera symbol in the upper left corner, the “Camera / Image” screen will launch as shown below. This is the mechanism that assigns the Cam that is starting up in iPhone to each number of the Switch application.
It’s pretty obvious how to do it so far, isn’t it? You can switch to any camera on the Switch app, or in this case, on the iPad. By the way, you can also use the Switch app on your iPhone, so you can also use the Switch function on your iPhone.
With this, multiple iPhone cameras and Switch which can switch them freely are linked. Finally, this is delivered by Ustream Producer installed on Mac, etc. Of course Ustream Producer is installed on Mac beforehand, but let’s install “TapStream Driver”.
From here on, it’s just like a normal Ustream.
That’s why, with the advent of this app, you can now easily stream and distribute multi-camera video. Until a little while ago, I was surprised by the fact that real-time streaming distribution was possible only with the iPhone, but now it feels like a long time ago, and the progress of technology is amazing.
By the way, what I personally thought was great was the fact that I could use my iPhone as a mere Webcam.
At the moment it looks like TapStream can only be used with “Ustream Producer”, but if you look at the site carefully, you’ll see that it’s described as “Ustream Producer and others”. In other words, it’s designed to be independent of the streaming driver from the start.
I think this is a huge breakthrough. Even if a more convenient streaming driver than Ustream comes out in the future, we’ll probably be able to migrate to it quickly. One candidate for this is the PC version of tweakath.
Or, you might be able to use Ustream and tweets at the same time. You’d need two Macs to do that, but it seems like this is a possibility. Well, I’m not sure how much need there is for this, and I don’t know if this is technically possible in the first place, but in any case, I’m sure there’s a lot of potential in the fact that it can be independent of the streaming driver.
But unfortunately, the “direct mode” that uses iPhone as “just Webcam”, I don’t understand this, but it is unstable and freezes often.
Well, this area will be improved little by little.
For the time being, it’s hard to find a personal use for the app due to its high functionality, but I’m very excited to see a great app that feels like the future.
こんなハイテクですが、とりあえず飲み会でやったら楽しそうだね、くらいしか思いつかないのも悲しいんですけどね。
