Hollywood Elsewhere’s long-nurtured dream of live video feeds is finally at hand. Last Friday morning re/code’s Kurt Wagner reported that Meerkat, the livestreaming video app that broke out during South By Southwest last March, is now allowing users to embed their livestreams directly onto their websites. The option “may provide publishers with a little more incentive to stream more often,” Wagner speculated, “or use Meerkat over Twitter’s rival service Periscope, which doesn’t have an embed option.”
My first wish piece along these lines was posted in March 2012. I posted another one last March, stating that “there surely must be some way to adapt Meerkat’s or Periscope’s skill sets to generate Hollywood Elsewhere video from my iPhone at the touch of a button and have it appear on the site…live events happening at the Cannes Film Festival, say, or during a sojourn in Rome, Paris or Prague or wherever.”
Now it’s simply a matter of hiring someone to install an HE/Meerkat icon somewhere at the top of the site — an icon that would expand into a video screen with a single click. A flashing red light could alert readers when live video is being transmitted, or there could be a permanent postage-stamp-sized screen that would go live whenever I decided to transmit. The screen would be capable of shifting to various sizes.