Crowdcast pros/cons

[yarikoptic]

Pros

• casts to hundreds (thousands?) of participants
• has chat
  • emoticons in the chat but IIRC as a separate post (ideally better be like mattermost emoticons per post)
• makes video record of the event to share later
• every participant it's just a participant of chat without audio/video unless invited
• built in polls
• built in q&a

Cons

• closed paid service
• limits to up to 4 active invited participants. Mitigated by starting zoom and sharing the screen. Cons: those who share can't see chat, those who participated have audio/video mismatch unless mute crowdcast (if I got it right)
• chat log, q&a, polls doesn't seem to have a permanent url
• chat is rudimentary, Afaik no @references (and to associate response with a particular comment) supported

Pros/cons (feature which might be needed)

• allows (or requires?) authorized (login/password) to access

[r03ert0]

It may be good to compare Crowdcast vs Jitsi, to better see which functionalities of crowdcast cannot be implemented open source: Jitsi has a chat, can record videos to youtube and vimeo, participants can have audio and video muted. Unclear if it can work for broadcasting alone. Jitsi's iframe API is a big plus (especially the data channel, which enables server-less inter-user interaction).

[r03ert0]

https://obsproject.com/ may be a good open source alternative for broadcasting.

[yarikoptic]

Here I would like to collect information about features of crowdcast we would like to have. We better discuss alternative setups in a dedicated issue #3 to which I had added a comment on the amazing OBS which I love (I would say it is not for every participant to use)

[soichih]

My daughter uses OBS to record her video and post them on YouTube. She says it's the best screen recording tool that's out there used by many YouTubers.

[yarikoptic]

Yes, OBS is awesome, and could be used probably at different "levels". E.g. I initiated #15 now to collect recommendations for speakers/participants. It, and in particular a windows-only (but might work on mac) clone mentioned in #4.