What the world needs is another online platform for all your video-sharing needs, right? Well, maybe.
While it can be difficult to muster enthusiasm for yet another game-changing world-beater, there is a new iPad app in town that brings a pretty compelling proposition to the table.
From the labs of Edo Segal, Erick Schonfeld, and Charley Miller, TouchCast is an iPad-optimized video authoring tool, delivering a Web/video cross-breed replete with navigable apps superimposed directly atop the footage. If that just made you splutter ‘huh?’, here’s what it looks like.
TouchCast touches down
Users can either ‘Touch’ or ‘Cast’ – the former meaning you can watch and interact with videos on your iPad or at TouchCast.com (Chrome and Safari only). But it’s the ‘Cast’ authoring tool that’s particularly alluring here, which obviously is an enabler for the ‘Touch’ aspect.
When you first launch the app, you’ll be asked to create an account or log-in – fortunately you needn’t do any of these in the first instance. You can dip your toe in without giving over any details.
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Now, you can create what’s unsurprisingly known as a TouchCast – a recorded video skit on anything you like. There are templates to get you going, such as News Cast…
…Business Cast, Sports Cast and more. Or, you can just create your own one from scratch.
The templates are great though, featuring a customizable, scrolling ‘Breaking News’ banner. It really would work a treat for citizen (or professional) journos.
Things start to get really interesting with video apps (vApps). TouchCast lets you create videos that are layered with live Web pages, video clips, maps, Twitter streams and other facets of the digital world. “We’re actually claiming that this is the future of the Web,” says Segal, TouchCasts’s CEO.
Indeed, TouchCast’s vApp library is ‘open’, so developers can create and customize their own vApps.
Viewers can manipulate, expand and generally interact with them as they see fit. And the good news is, they can also switch them on and off with the deftest of touches.
So, as a video creator, you can create pretty rich, professional-grade broadcasts directly from your tablet in seconds.
You can also browse other TouchCasts, while bookmarking your favorites.
TouchCast has some notable people at the helm too – Segal made his mark during the early days of the Web, selling his Relegence financial newswire to AOL in 2006. And Schonfeld is perhaps best known as a former TechCrunch editor.
Though TouchCast is currently iPad-only, it will be rolling out a PC incarnation this fall. Meanwhile, check out the official promo video below…on YouTube.
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