Phil Mask

An introduction.

The broadcasting world is changing, and with it comes new opportunities for ordinary people to do some things previously reserved for the big corporations with large budgets and make money out of it too.

I’m talking about the world of Online Television Shows which have been making a transition from the Living Room TV to the computer room Monitor. Individuals and smaller businesses are starting to get hold of this fact and run with it.

What they are doing is setting up their own mini TV studios and producing their own shows featuring useful, entertaining content to promote their interests, hobbies, products or services online and building a crowd of viewers who are also eager to buy products related to their interests.

Changes in technology have opened the door for many budding entrepreneurs.

Internet connections have become faster and so have computers – along with better recording equipment and editing software that previously would have been impossible for the average person to afford.

What this means for you and I is that we have at our fingertips some powerful tools to promote our businesses and products in a very effective way – Namely video – streamed over the internet.

What you will need to create your own basic TV studio.

Below I give a brief overview of how I created my own online TV studio on a budget in terms of equipment and online services.

Needing to stick to a very small cash outlay I created my own virtual TV studio with a few basics.

At the heart of my system when I first got started was a second hand 2.6 Ghz Celeron computer with 1.5Gb of RAM with Windows XP.

I later upgraded this to a secondhand Mac G5 running Tiger which works beautifully.

My video capture devices consist of a good quality webcam and a consumer level video camera which takes decent video. This gives me the option of recording both at home or out in another location.

I purchased two reading lamps for lighting and these work quite well.

For video editing I started out with a freeware program which runs on my G4 Mac machine which I still have. I also currently use good old iMovie and Final Cut Express to do my more recent work.

There are some good free and low cost video editors out there for Windows too (I just prefer using my system because it is what I already had on hand).

The only other things I use are a secondhand tripod, a broadband connection and of course a streaming video hosting service and a website to put it all together. Here I had two choices – a free platform such as youtube or a paid hosting service.

I opted for a paid service over free simply because it offers more advantages such as security and control of my own videos, my choice to have links (or not) to content of my own choosing and the ability to set things up exactly how I wanted it without someone else’s ads showing on my material.

So in reality all you really need as far as hardware and consumables is concerned is a recent computer, a good webcam with inbuilt mic, internet connection and a streaming video account (and a website to showcase your work).

This will get you started in producing your own shows with a minimal outlay.