While hopeful, I wasn't sure if it would really work as easily as the video and .pdfs claimed. I wanted to cast the OSL semifinals series between stork and jaedong; so i used the match as a test trial of eLive's beta. I got a key in like 15 minutes (thanks guys). At first, I was frustrated because the casting program wouldn't start for me. I thought "oh great, this is yet another tool that I can't use because my computer and/or internet is garbage." Turns out, it was just a beta bug that was fixed in just a few hours of the error report (talk about fast tech support).
This morning, I finally sat down to cast the games and I was EXTREMELY pleased with the system. First off, the interface is both simple and has a very familiar feel to it. The casting program takes a youtube video of a game and puts it into its player with essentially the same interface as a youtube page. You can have different videos, texts, and images and easily swap between them or keep them playing in the background. i.e. you could leave a game running and flash pictures of the players or the map during the intro. I didn't incorporate this feature, but I played around with it and it seemed very easy and viable.
When I went to cast the games I kept it very standard and simple to test out the system. One of the few things I found annoying was that when I clicked "start" to begin the cast, my video didn't also start. I had to click play on the video interface as well. Basically, it means that for a moment at the start of each video there is a blank screen. Mildly aesthetically annoying, but not a real problem. Other than that, the casting experience was very easy. Minimizing and maximizing the video or pausing and starting it again gave no problems. A very nice feature in both casting and watching is the audio controls that allow you to control the volume level of both yourself and the video (no more re-ups because I forgot to turn down the Koreans!!). Once I finished each video, I simply clicked "stop," edited some info for the VOD, and clicked "finalize." eLive does the rest. There is no editing required!! Simply cast what you see, and your viewers see what you see and hear what you say.
As it is in Beta, there are some issues of course. Most of them are aesthetic and minor/easily fixed.
Issues:
* Audio has some static that doesn't appear when recording using audacity or windows sound recorder
* Unable to edit title, description, or playlist after finalizing
* No "video response" feature as of yet
* More intricate compilation videos are probably infeasible using eLive
* Appears to only allow uploaded videos - no screen capture
Here is my profile on eLive so you can watch the games!
Later, I will try using some of the features such as incorporating text/links into VODS, drawing on screen, etc. to see how viable they are during a cast. eLive also claims to make multi-casting very easy and I will try to test that out and let everyone know how it works.