A Note about Air Mozilla

Next Wednesday, July 11, at 2pm PDT/9pm GMT, we’ll be relaunching Air Mozilla. Read more on what to expect over at Asa’s blog.

The live webcast requires the Flash player 9 plugin (for Windows, Mac OS or Linux) to be installed to view the video stream. For a number of reasons, I’m less than happy about requiring the use of a proprietary piece of software on the client end to experience the webcast. Because we know not everyone who’s interested in the interview has Flash installed, we’ll be quickly archiving and making available the recorded webcast in multiple formats, including Theora, shortly after the live webcast.

The webcast solution we’re using for the relaunch of Air Mozilla supports about 800 simultaneous streams, and allows us to intercut the live webcast with pre-recorded content from a web-based control panel. That said – we’re not committed longterm to any single solution, and we’re very interested in hearing from folks who know of open source webcasting solutions that we can also assess for future Air Mozilla shows.

Chris Double’s ongoing work to add <video> element support in Firefox is moving us forward to the day that we can all watch webcasts in our browsers with no proprietary plugins required. In the meantime we’re looking forward to re-introducing Air Mozilla next week, and hope you’ll join us.