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Live Music in Second Life
Kate Thompson writes "Alice Taylor at Wonderland writes that BBC Radio 1 is coming to Second Life, with a virtual festival and simulcast this weekend to coincide with Radio 1's One Big Weekend event. Second Life users can catch live performances in-game by acts including Muse, Razorlight and Gnarls Barkley. Pitchforkmedia.com also reported on the rise of live music in Second Life a couple of weeks ago, focusing on the launch of Muse Isle and the swarms of coffeehouse performers playing covers every night in-game."
Nope BBC dont do commercials.
I don't play Second Life and I don't ever want to, but I think it's nice to see that the BBC is actually realizing the potential of online media compared to other corporations. Newspapers don't get it. Television studios don't get it. The RIAA and MPAA don't get it. Finally someone gets it. I'm personally glad that they managed to find a niche and work into it. Let's hope they do it with class.
I'm Eggy Lippmann in Second Life and I worked on this project, having made the pretty radio you see in that blog, among other things.
I can tell you one thing - BBC Radio 1 is only streamed in WMA and RAM.
Second Life supports inworld audio and video streaming, but not in these formats.
You can set an URL as a property of a land parcel, and people on that parcel will get the URL from the server to stream from it on the client side... but it will only read MP3 and OGG streams.
The way I got around this was by launching the user's browser... which is a horrible hack, but it was the only way.
Nobody forces you to listen to the stream. Streams in Second Life work on a per-parcel basis. Meaning, if you're on someone's land, you get to listen to the music they chose. If you're on your land, you get to listen to whatever you choose. In addition, streamed music is off by default, so when you're flying around you won't switch from stream to stream all the time.