May 2008

May 21, 2008

Another Cocomo Experiment : The YouTube LivingRoom

Posted by Nigel Pegg at 01:57 PM

I am indeed a sucker for the 'mashups'. And YouTube lets us put their player in our Flex apps. See where this is going? The basic idea here is... watch YouTube together, chat, and annotate your fave videos. Together.

pkerman.png

Try it out!

Just search using the panel on top, and whatever vid you select will be watched by everyone. Scrubbing and play/pause is also synched up. All this through a simple Cocomo sharedModel - to be clear, we're not streaming the videos, just the videoID, so that each person in the room can go fetch it themselves from YouTube.

This has actually been up live for over a month, and could really stand some improvement, but I'm already slammed with real work to do, and can't afford any more time to spruce it up. Apologies for any RTEs you might hit =). A few features I'd like to see - all totally doable with Cocomo today, just suffering from a lack of spare time :

  • Baton passing - right now it's pretty chaotic, and you can steal control from each other.
  • Video History - a shared history of which videos have been watched, and who chose them. This way when people watch American Idol, I can shame them ;-).
  • Playlists and recording - It would be cool to be able to build custom playlists, almost "shows" made of videos strung together, which could be played back for the audience. I'm sure some other YouTube startup is already doing this though, minus the real-time (call me!).
  • Audio and Video - it might be cooler to be able to actually talk over the video, MST3K-style, using VoIP. We could do that today (easily!), but I'll wait until SPEEX comes out in FP10 =).

    Maybe I'll give the source code to the private beta folks and ask them to improve it. But for now, please enjoy, and leave a comment if you hit issues.

    (Big Ups to the YouTube team, and to the immortal Phillip Kerman, who's like a friend... NO - AN ENEMY!).

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