Today I will be doing a webcast of Robert J Nemiroff’s Lecture from Nehru Planetarium. The purpose of writing this blog is to do two things
- To cherish how IT can help NGOs and organizations to reach out to masses
- To Cherish How IT can Help NGOs for free to reach out to masses
Believe me, if you are a Fortune 1000 company, you would be for sure having all the high tech gadgets and services to do your job. But for an NGO like the one which I work for as a Hobby, its difficult to shed out that much load of money. But only with some experience and the instinct to reach out to masses, we are also able to do a pretty good job, and believe me it’s pretty good. I can rather call it “NASA Grade” – as the person’s lecture I am going to webcast is the Founder of http://apod.nasa.gov
So, I decided to list down what I have done for this event so that any other NGO who wants to do similar things can get some help here.
Gadgets Required:
- An Android (2.2 or later) phone. I bet you don’t have to buy it. you can certainly borrow it from anyone.
Services Required
- 3G connectivity. Here some expense will be required. I went with an Airtel Cash Card with 4GB 3G limit for 750/-(Validity 1 month)
- Free Live Streaming service from www.livestream.com . This is a CDN provider and lets you stream a webcast via their servers. This means, you will be only uploading the stream to their server and of the connections and bandwidth will be taken care by them. For free, by default they only provide access to 50 Viewers. But if you get your site verified and you can show a genuine cause, they even give you unlimited viewership with in two days. You can further embed their link to your website and get the live feed hosted.
The outcome
Watch it by yourself:
http://aaadelhi.org/?q=node/276
NOTE: Google’s Youtube provides similar free services for NGOs in US. But Indian NGOs are yet not as lucky as their US friends. I tried writing to google for help, but didn’t even got a reply from them
Anindya Roy 
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